Heroes in Business - Eric Mulvin, How Outsourcing Can Impact Small Businesses, Contact Center Cactus Chat

Episode Date: April 18, 2023

Eric Mulvin, How Outsourcing Can Impact Small Businesses, Contact Center Cactus Chat. Continuing on their 8th Anniversary Series, Eric returns to the Philippines with Jake to go over how contact centers like Pac Biz help startups, and mom and pop companies alike with their operations.  

welcome back to another episode of the contact center cactus chat um back here in the philippines again and we've got jake back uh we're here together again in the philippines and uh just came back from your uh trip in the u.s for many months yeah and uh yeah i'm glad that we're here again recording and for another topic and, it's nice to be back. And yeah, people are excited, probably excited to hear our new episode. Yeah, I hope so. Hope you're willing. If you're listening, then you should be excited because today we're going to be talking about

how outsourcing can help impact small businesses. And if you're a business owner, unless you have a giant, giant business, then more than likely your business is considered a small business. In fact, you kind of forget, you know, you think of the little mom and pop companies, that's a small business. But according to the SBA, if your business has under 40 million in revenue or you have under 1500 employees, you're still a small business so that covers a lot of companies out there right yeah it's um yeah so pricing the top the level of uh considered a small business is you know taking revenue at that high so there's a lot of you over

there and um i know that uh you know some of you are struggling and um you want maybe what you might want to listen and consider the ideas that we have here. And these are all based on the experiences that we had for the past years of working with. Not just years, eight years. We're still celebrating the eight-year anniversary of PACBiz. And Jake made it back just in time to celebrate with us and i thought it was kind of cool because usually you're welcoming me here and i got to be here and welcome you here yeah you got in here first yeah beat you here so um but yeah eight years so we've had eight

years of experience working with small businesses uh across the uk canada and the the US. And we've seen a lot over those last eight years. And, you know, even before this, eight years ago, I had my own taxi business and Jake was supporting that. So, well, we have seen a lot and gone through a lot together. Oh, yeah. I can remember that. I don't know how we categorize that company. I don't know how we categorize that company.

I don't think they'd, it doesn't fit under the small business definition. Micro business, I think, is a category. It would probably be a micro business. Yeah, and from the experience that I had working with you at that time was really under, I mean, a lot. Like taking care of, being a call taker and dispatcher at the same time, building relationships with the drivers, along with customers, which are pretty common. And they like a business, so they call back, and they get to know their voices,

and being familiar with where they go, and all this stuff. and being familiar with where they go and all this stuff. So looking back, I can't think what are the missing pieces for that company to be successful. And as we all know, we transitioned into a call center and Eric didn't continue working um and uh with that business so um yeah we we can spot what are the missing pieces of uh of uh you know small businesses to make it more successful we work with different uh level um i mean let sizes of businesses so there are small businesses there are big businesses so we we can we can

really see uh what you're going to become if you're a small business and um now you know what to expect if you're going to grow um bigger and um even more you know double or triple your the size of your current businesses so um yeah we can guide you from there, basing on that. And a lot of, you know, if you would ask, we are prepared. Like, there are groups of agents who are taking care of bigger businesses that has a really different kind of guidelines,

like more stricter, more, more like really, really in line with the, with the policy. And they really built for, you know, having to run the business for a while. So, and there are also businesses which are small and,

you know, the, it's like kind of freestyle, like just being a call taker, you know, just take calls and take the orders and let the dispatchers deal with the dispatching and those things. So, yeah. And outsourcing, we talk about outsourcing, how it helps small businesses yeah we uh they're uh aside from what i mentioned earlier

um the the size of the size of businesses that we cover is uh you know we we had that big company before you can remember eric and um uh we can really uh see uh how how I mean the expertise of those people over there on shore like they tell us this has to be done like this and then you know the things that really they consider more you know

the counting of the state pretty simple the reasons why we have this no-show, you know, for small businesses, I don't know if with TrueCap before, we would say that no-show is because the customer wasn't there.

And we didn't question why. So what Jake's talking about for you, those who are not in the tax industry, no-show is when you go to pick up a customer and they're not there. Yeah, they're not there. And so these bigger companies ask these questions, why? So we need to provide those reasons why the customers were not there. Is it the fault of the call taker, the dispatcher, the driver, or the customer?

So we need to work with that. We don't have, we're not recording this stuff for Eric. And I think those are the things that the small businesses or the businesses that just started doing with, you know, with the taxi business would have to learn. And yeah. You make a great point because the way I look at it

as a small business is when you first start out, you're wearing a lot of hats, right? And you're just starting out. All those different hats, maybe you're updating the website, you're answering the phones, you're managing the staff,

you're hiring, you're doing the interviews, you're doing the staff, you're hiring, you're doing the interviews, you're doing the training. And as your business gets bigger, you get to take some of those hats off and you get to give them to other employees. And then you get to be more sophisticated. I think even here at PacBiz, the policies and procedures that we have today compared to three, two, I mean, five years ago, six years ago, seven years ago, when we were much smaller, or as Jake was saying, when I had my own taxi company almost over 10 years ago now, we're just trying to keep the lights on. We're just trying to get day to day. And the challenges for those businesses are

different as you get bigger. And so what's interesting for us is we have to adapt to wherever that business is at, whether it's like a business owner that's wearing a lot of hats. Okay. We can take a couple of those from you so that you could focus on other things. And then as it gets bigger, it's not that we're taking away work from the owners. Now it's like, there's challenges in the business such as they don't have, they, they know that the calls need to be listened to, but maybe there's a lot of turnover. So they can't keep up with that. Or, um, the, they know that things need to be measured and, uh, we need to look at listening to calls. We need to look at listening to calls you need to look at

doing all this stuff that business owner with all those hats they can't do that because they again they got all those other hats so they got to focus on paying the bills they got to focus on being the the banking person and so it really you know becomes challenging yeah it's really important you know it's you know how the customers are taking care of like you know like what customer can cause a an impact to you know if you're living in a small small city or with your small taxing business and you know that's it's really rare that you don't have a competition it has you have to have a competition. It has, you have to have a competition that,

you know, other, other people are running taxi businesses over there. How would you be like ahead of them? Of course, you know, we're getting the right people, you know,

just connecting to the right outsourcing company. Yeah. And that's, that's the reason why, so there's there's a lot that you can get from um from outsourcing uh then uh you know just you know just trying to run your own business on your own and um you know i said from what eric mentioned that you know trying to get some of your hats like uh you know giving it give it to us and uh um aside from that um uh the company that you're trying to work for uh like i'd like to mention the app is uh it's we've been we've been here for eight years and um you know we've seen a lot from the smallest business to the biggest business that we had, like thousands and thousands of fleets. And multiple industries.

We've had big clients that are in e-commerce and other industries. And just today, I had a whole conversation with someone that manages a hotel and resort. And we're looking at airlines. We're in healthcare. We're doing virtual assisting. And the virtual assisting stuff is cool, too, because we're working with really micro businesses. You know, they're wearing all the hats. And they're being overwhelmed because they're managing their own calendar.

They're following up with people on their LinkedIn. On top of, like, what do they got to do to push the company forward? Yeah, it's a lot. So we get to see all that. And I think one thing that, you know, people, what are some actionable takeaways here? If you're a small business and you're scaling and like, what can you learn from working with a call center? And I think one of the things that I've seen time and time again is a nice pattern, which is when people outsource for the, especially for the first time, then the,

their key people, they're never let go. They're never fired. What do they do with them? Put them somewhere else like home, you know, being a call taker is, they're never let go they're never fired what do they do with though put them somewhere else like home you know being a go call taker is long it's somehow like you know you you be you'll be trapped on that chair for eight hours you know now just doing a simple job that technicals and though it's simple that would say but and it has to have skills like uh you know how to handle uh talk to a proper way of talking to to the customer like we always wanted them to

call back you know the experience is also there that we consider that they will be happy and uh during the you know uh the the conversation. And yeah, there's so many things that should be considered being a call taker as well, aside from those things. But going back to what are those people that used to do that call taking do right after outsourcing, no, they can be doing so many things like the marketing and

doing so many stuff, planning ahead, checking what would be the coming events, so many things. And like a lot, the weather, that can also be considered that there are so many things that would come up by just changing the weather. Like there's a storm coming in and things like that. And busy time during Christmas seasons. And we would talk about this when they have that event locally. So if the call takers are not available, we're here. We take over and we're not trying ourselves, thinking that I could be in that event while I'm here

because the things that are happening there are not happening here. So what excites the people there to go out and not to go to work doesn't affect the people who are working here in the Philippines. So when people are outsourcing for the first time, then that means that jobs are impacted locally, but not necessarily. I would say 80% to 90% of the time, what are they doing with those people,

those key people that maybe have been managing the call center, taking calls, they don't just get let go, right? Like what do you usually see those people end up? Actually, there are two things that's going to happen. The people that are giving the headaches, they can go. Yeah. And the people are really helping them with the company they can stay and they can give them a different kind of you know level of roles and yeah like they can they can help planning and you know managing the

business and while the you know the other people are yeah who will be you know you can you can identify where they will they will be good at so it's that's another help from you know outsourcing yeah because I think you know a lot of business owners a dream about like oh man if I could just have this person take this over but I can't because they're taking calls and I can't we keep losing people and answering the phones and those are the good those are the bigger little bit bigger of a business uh we also work with a lot of businesses where they're smaller like I mean I think of uh like home service companies uh like when everyone first got started like with me in the

taxi business we were literally answering our own phone calls for the taxi company and that's where we started the call center and no i just had this conversation with the the the resort owner or someone that manages the resort just a little bit ago, they're like, we want to focus on the operations of the hotel. We want to focus on making that a great guest experience. But instead, they've got to deal with three people answering the phones and handling reservations, and there's a lot of turnover. People aren't maybe performing well, and that's just one symptom.

Let's talk about the other one. When you are running, if you have someone working at your company, answering the phones, answering emails, and you're a small, small business, how much time and resources do you have to listen to the phone calls, to look at their metrics, to see are they doing average handle time?

When they make a mistake, are you able to coach them and making sure they're making improvements? Many times with a lot of these businesses, it's an afterthought. And so when they start to outsource, now they're able to improve customer service because now we do all that. We're listening to calls. We're coaching the agent. We're making sure that they're logged in on time. And if not, someone else is filling in or we're working with the client to make sure, you know, they fill in for a little bit, whatever. We work as a team to make sure that the calls are being handled, the customer's getting a great experience. And it is a lot of stuff that happens behind the scenes,

behind the scenes that you don't get to do when you're a smaller company, it just gets ignored. Some other companies are taking calls by just casually talking to the customer. Like here on the outsourced company, call takers or agents are really trying to make that customer feel like he's being valued. Like the way they talk to them, proper way of introducing the company, stuff like that, opening sp speeds and those things, and, you know, not interrupting them while they're talking. Those are small things, but, you know, those are, you know,

they feel like, they feel different right after that, like the experience that we're talking about. It's, you know, it's different. So that's how outsourcing companies' role is really taking impact to those small businesses. And there are small other businesses that are saying that your call takers are amazing. How can we think of that? You know, just talking to customers, well, you know, just that's how,

if you're working in a call center for a while, that's within you already. Like, you can't take that away from you. Even if outside talking to different people, and, you know, it's already within you so that's that's something that we have with with it with our company that no that's we say is normal but you know I can see how amazed those small business owners when they hear how our call takers take the calls and how they how we talk to their customers and for sure first-time customers will call back as they know how they can feel out they were treated when they call yeah and you

know for its again a lot of people start a business and they've got this dream that they want to make it this bigger company. But many times with the average, the majority of small businesses that are created out there fail after, you know, five years or so. And like, why is that? It's because you're not able to do everything that you want to do. it's because you're not able to do everything that you want to do. Like if you had more time, money, resources, then you might be able to make that business successful. Maybe you're just in the wrong industry completely,

but that's another story. If you're seeing the growth, if you're seeing the potential, we're getting more customers. Now we can keep up. We're getting calls, but we can't keep good people on the phones to answer them or the business owners answering them. Or even worse, the people that don't show up. Like, how many times can your business be closed or not available because they're not there?

They're not showing up. So you don't need to worry about those call takers or agents not showing up on your end. That's our problem. And we have a lot of people that can fill in and um you know cover shifts so so you're so for small business owners you guys listening here if you're the entrepreneur and you're doing a lot of the work yourself then think about like okay how do you like what is your goals where do you want to be at the next three to five years and how are you going to get there quicker uh because time is money and

you know you don't you can't spend the rest of your life trying to figure this out like you got to get that business going maybe you've made sacrifices you quit your job to start this business or you've been at this for a couple years and you're you're scraping by you're like okay if i could just do this and this and this, we'll be successful. And I remember that when we had the taxi business, I'm like, okay, if I can get this account and this account and we can do this, then we can get bigger and then we can invest in that. And that's how outsourcing can help you get there sooner. And it's like a shortcut to skip some of that pain of figuring out how to manage the calls and the phone, I guess a huge, important piece of your business, the customer experience. And if that's suffering, are people going to come back to you? Because really like when your business is, is trying to grow,

you're competing against other businesses that already exist. Unless you come up with a brand new something, brand new business that's never been around before. But more than likely. You're out there competing against the big dogs. And with way less resources. Way less people. And it's tough. So that means long nights. Not sleeping.

Sacrificing time with family. Pouring in money to the company. Maybe I'm speaking your guys' language. Of people listening right now because you're in the middle of that and so if you're not outsourcing or if you're outsourcing with the wrong company and they're not able to achieve the goals that you're looking at certain handle time happy customers maybe that people you're outsourcing to they could potentially have their own turnover issues.

Especially, you know, in a place, there's cities here in the Philippines, they always, you might've heard me say on a past episode, you know, you can be fired in the morning, quit in the morning and find another job in the afternoon because there's that many call centers. And so if it's that easy to quit and get another job, then, you know, that's still not going to be good for you. You haven't solved that problem yet. So the turnover with your outsourced company also has to be low. Otherwise you're still going to be cycling through, like they're going to have to bring new people on and they've got to learn, make some mistakes, and then they'll get to that level you're looking at. So can you afford to do that? You know, like the way I try to take that approach back 10 years ago, 11 years ago with my tax business, we try to pay people like minimum wage, like, okay, at least we'll have some person with a heartbeat answering the phone

so that it's not ringing off the hook and no one's picking up or that it's not one week the hook and no one's picking up or that it's not one week before we get to those customer emails. Like someone's responding better than nothing, but really is it, you know, like you've just plugged the hole, but it's still leaking. And so, yeah. And I can only imagine like one customer will say, I'm not going to call that company again because of experience. Yeah. And yeah yeah one customer can talk to other people and you know spreading those news that you know they're not being treated uh well and so why yeah you need every customer when you're a small business i don't think anybody i mean when you're a big giant corporation

they don't seem to care but that's who you guys are competing against. That's who you guys think, all right, these big companies, I could do a much better job serving my community, providing this service, selling this product. And so that's where you're going. Like you could be going up against Amazon. You could be going up against, you know could be going up against just giant companies. So how are you going to compete against them? And how much money and time and effort are you spending to acquire those customers? And then you give them a crap experience when they call in on the phone because you don't have enough staff or the staff you have isn't trained.

They're all new because they keep getting hired again. That's the kind of stuff that we help solve for small businesses. Because if you get those things figured out and now you're able to focus on your business or you got key people now, you got someone that was managing your call center agents and now they're managing operations. Now they're able to, they know your business well. That's why they keep them. And now they put them in another part of the company

so that you can start growing. Now you can take off more hats as a business owner and maybe you grab some more hats, some new ones that you've been wanting to put on. And that's how you grow. And that's how working with a partner like an outsourced business like us here can help you get there and achieve those goals

yeah so outsourcing uh it's like starting to uh get rid half of the problem that you have right now so give that problem to us and i will help you and i'll go ahead and um go uh get the problem how to grow your business and um there's so many things out there that you can do with the business just let us do the you know the part where the cost and our cost that I can take care of focus on your core business right and because I always say one of my phrases I would say is you didn't start your business to start a call center you didn't start your business to schedule a bunch of calendar invites and answer emails but you know it's frustrating when it's, you know, 12 o'clock at night and you're still looking at, I've got another hour of emails.

I still got to get through because I don't have the resources to, to, to help answer these, or I'm taking calls or I'm managing this person that's managing the call center. So, yeah. So I really hope that this episode this episode uh we probably will break this down into two but if it's one long one and okay thanks for listening the whole time but i hope you got some nuggets out of this and uh some valuable like tips on or reasons anyway on if you're on the fence about outsourcing and you're thinking about if this right for me and yeah i mean there's some real real gold examples examples Jake and I just shared on why it helps the companies that we help. And, you know, at the end of the day, almost every

single client that's ever worked with us here at PacBiz over the eight years has stuck with us. And once they start working with us, they, not only do they stay working with us, but they add on more people and they grow and then they hit the goals they're looking for. And now what do you know? Like they're able to take that money that they've saved and invested in other parts of the company to help the company grow. Or now their sales are better and so they have more money that way and they're able to grow. But it takes money. It takes time and effort.

And we help with all of that for small businesses. So, well, Jake, Hey, welcome back again. It's great to be doing podcasts with you again out here. So thanks for being on the show and thank you guys for listening.

And so what are we talking about next episode? We're going to be customer experience metrics. It looks like. So, yeah, I'll measure it and yeah, how to measure it. And yeah, measuring about customer experience. You know, it should start with, you know,

when the customer is, you know, thinking of how to, you know, like how to get to you, you know, how easy it is to get to you, to, to get your service. And then we'll talk about that in the next episode and we'll dive into that. So thank you guys for listening. And if you want to learn more about customer experience, check us out in two weeks, we'll come out with our next episode until then. See you guys later.