Heroes in Business - Eric Mulvin, Successful Outsourcing Part 1, What Are, Contact Center Cactus Chat

Episode Date: October 4, 2022

Eric and Jake get into the nitty-gritty of onshore, nearshore, and offshore outsourcing, working with freelancers, and more in this episode of the Contact Center Cactus Chat.

Welcome to the Contact Center Cactus Chat Podcast. I'm your host, Eric Malvin, coming to you from sunny Phoenix, Arizona. And I'm your co-host, Jake Ayam, from Dumagiri City, Philippines. I'm a serial entrepreneur, started my first business 10 years ago, and six LLCs later, I started PacBiz Contact Center Outsourcing in 2015. Today, we have over 200 employees growing. And I'm the operations manager here in PackBiz, and I've been working with Eric since 2014, and I grew as a company group. So whether you're looking to outsource for the first time, whether you manage a contact center, or you're just looking to improve your customer experience, we'll be covering topics for you. So business managers,

operations managers, business owners, this is for you, so make sure to subscribe. operations managers, business owners, this is for you, so make sure to subscribe. Today we're going to be talking all about outsourcing, and we're going to talk about the difference between onshore versus offshore, working with an outsourcing company versus freelance, how to outsource successfully, that's a really important topic, what's the difference between dedicated staffing or paying per call and strategic outsourcing and why you should pay more attention to how you're planning out your outsourcing? And so that's a lot of content to pack in. It's not going to all fit into one episode.

And so we're going to split this up part one today and episode eight is going to be part two. And so to kick things off with my co-host, Jake. All right. Let's start with the question. So what are different kind of ways to, you know, to outsource? Yeah. So if you're outsourcing, you've got some options to consider here.

Now, there's onshore, nearshore, and offshore. Now, what's the difference between those? nearshore and offshore now what's the difference between those uh onshore is you have uh people you're outsourcing to in your own country and so you might find a business in your own city maybe somewhere else in your country but you're you're working with someone that's born and has their business in in their own in the country that you're from and so some of the cultural differences maybe language barriers you won't necessarily have that but the cost savings will not be there that might cost more than what you're currently paying for onshore and then nearshore is you're looking outside of your country but still close by so if you're in the u.s and you outsource to mexico that'd be near

shore so it's close by you could easily travel to it unlike offshore which is typically a bit further away but then you also get to take advantage of lower rates and so philippines is a great example where pacvis is based based. India, even countries like Albania, Ukraine, actually all over the world, people are offering outsourcing from their country. And so offshore is available all over. So thanks for the question, Jake. Now I've got a question for you. You can outsource with a company or you could work directly with an individual.

So you help manage the office at PacBiz. And working with – we're one option, right? You could work with one company like us. But what are the advantages with working with a company like Pacbiz versus hiring freelance through some of the different freelance websites? Yeah actually there's there's a lot of differences like I mean talking about hiring directly to a person versus you know outsourcing to a company um you know i think that that involves the reliability and the accountability and of course if uh if you are working directly with a person and you know just

it's you know who who would you know who who's who is uh accountable uh for any mistakes. And if there are mistakes that are done, you're done with that person. You'll be looking for someone else. Unlike if you're outsourcing with a company, just like what we do, we provide talents. We always do backup people we do have backup people for certain tasks or you know jobs or positions i've been talking with a lot of businesses lately that have outsourced they're outsourcing currently and they're not

happy with the results and the key word I keep hearing is reliability. And you mentioned the backup person that we provide and it's to make sure that if there's a shift assigned that we're covering it. And some of the ways that I've seen us make sure that there's reliability, if that person is sick or out, there's a supervisor that's making sure the backup's in. And if for some reason maybe the backup is not available, then we're notifying the client. So they're aware many times in advance that we are not able to cover the shift compared to figuring out 30 minutes in, you're still trying to contact the rep, what's going on. And there could be a number of reasons why they're not available.

Maybe there's a power outage, an internet outage. And those are, again, things that when you're working with a company. We have. We provide. Yeah. Like, to talk about that for a bit. Like, what are the things that we help do to back up these agents, even if they're working from home? Yeah, we do have the power pack so uh though we are using uh we're using laptops um for them to you know as you know part of the uh their workstations at home they have a laptops and um so we all know that laptops they have their own batteries but you know for a longer outage of power outage outages we have this power pack that would support

the power and along with that we have the internet uh back backups so and yeah, that's the, that's one, those are the things that we provide to the call takers and the most important is we also have backup people. So aside from that, aside from those things that we sent to

the agents, we have people also who are, you know, as backup uh in different locations and we also have people in the office since we're doing hybrid office yeah thanks thanks for sharing because uh your perspective out there since you're the one overseeing things in the philippines uh so yeah now you've been an account manager for years and uh you work closely with clients as they get started uh and so you know one of the other things that people need to look out for is uh that we see the differences when we're working with companies is those who have outsourced

before and uh maybe those who haven't so kind of break that down a little bit like what do you what do you typically see from your perspective when businesses are first starting because you know like i'm sure you're thinking sometimes like oh this company could be more prepared uh because you don't know what you don't know like you're getting these companies are going into this kind of figuring it out as they go uh and so you know what are you seeing when businesses first start? Like for the first time, of course, we have supports for them. And most of the time, the support that we do work.

And so there was one time I remember that we had this client that didn't have any any any idea and we just you know we we learned the things that they they want us to to have and at the same time we're giving them idea and what to expect and on the you know the days to come and you know so also the same as you know the expectations that would come along um with uh with uh with the onboarding call you would know uh what to expect and all these things so for the people who are not experienced uh i mean who does that who doesn't have experience experience with outsourcing you know you will be guided so but there is the advantage of it you know working with us since we have experience working with

those with both the experienced one and non experienced companies who tried to work with pack based so I think it's just that uh you know uh getting get the experience like we can help uh the non-experienced ones because of the uh the experience that we have for the experienced companies with us outsourcing and um yeah well with that, I have a question for you, Eric. Yeah, you know what? I think we are kind of at our time for this episode. So let's just take a quick timeout here and end it for Episode 7. So thank you guys for listening.

I hope you've been learning, and I hope you're really interested to hear what we've got to say next Episode 8. We're going to keep the conversation going and I'm gonna let Jake ask his question in the next episode here. So thank you guys for listening and we'll catch you next week.