Heroes in Business - Eric Mulvin, Working with a Taxi Contact Center Part, Contact Center Cactus Chat

Episode Date: October 19, 2022

Eric and Jake get into the nitty-gritty on the importance of outsourcing a customer call team for your transportation business 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, Jay Kayang, 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's episode we're going to be talking about uh taxi companies and the next two episodes we're going to be talking about taxi companies and uh outsourcing your taxi calls and customer calls even if you uh don't want a taxi company it doesn't matter i think you'll get something out of these next couple episodes and uh but really want to talk about uh for those of you who have never outsourced before if you're a taxi business what is the difference between outsourcing your customer calls and driver calls because there is a difference and so this episode we're going to be talking about your customer calls next episode we'll be talking about outsourcing driver calls and the

the big difference there is they're different kind of customers and we handle them way differently and if you guys run a taxi company you'll know and Jake's the one that manages operations in the Philippines so you you have to deal with it a lot in fact you know it takes a different skill set right tell me about that a little bit for the taxi uh company uh you know to outsource uh for customer support and driver support um there's a difference uh the the customer is of course they're uh the driver is also a customer to the company and we take care of them and the same way as we treat this the colors who are the customers that will want to be picked up that's how we also take care of the drivers yeah and you

know you talked about different companies like if you're making if you're a restaurant you don't have your own delivery people, you outsource that. There's a lot of examples we can go across. But the big thing that all of these companies have in common, the ones that work with PacBiz and other businesses that outsource, the biggest thing they have in common is that customer support is not the core part of their business, where for us it is. For PacBiz, we're all about that. That's our product is customer support, the customer experience.

If you're a restaurant, it's the food. It's not, how is that delivery driver making their turns when they're getting to your home? Or how are they, like, are they within the speed limit? Are they driving responsibly in the neighborhoods? No, that's not the responsibility of the restaurant. They want to make sure that they have good food. And if they are focused on the delivery driver, they're not going to be able to put as much attention to the food.

And that's what we're saying with these taxi companies and with any business. If the call center is not a core part of your business all right then outsource that to companies or that's our focus that's our that's what we do just like if you go to the restaurant you expect good food you go to us you expect good support and so for the taxi companies yeah they're not that they you guys aren't in the business of providing uh call centers uh in the past that was the case but now that's not and so today we're talking about the customer support side of things and so jake tell me why would a taxi company outsource their support um yeah based on experience what I see and what the taxi company owners are happy about is you know they the I think first and foremost is you know the the

employment they don't need to worry about employees so we take care of that side and you know probably it's because we've been here for a while now. All these things that they're doing over with you know with the people they're their agents or their call takers that those problems are already taken care of here in our end like we all have these guidelines the QA metrics and all other stuff like they you know all the I mean after all the times that we spent doing this thing we we're not perfect but you know probably close to it and we you know we make sure that uh you know we deliver a good customer experience so that's that's the thing that you can get when you outsource the call taking.

And, you know, eventually, as these agents, you know, from the beginning, we don't have dispatchers or controllers, right? Yeah, in the beginning, you're right. And they begin to have the skills. Like, they know this place. They're very familiar with the map. They're very familiar with the map they're very familiar with the drivers and you know even though they're just being call takers they already have this knowledge about where these drivers are you know are going home where these drivers are usually located and you know

when we were offered before if we can do the dispatching and then we try and there you go. It's not really difficult for us to adopt to take driver calls. Awesome. That is great to hear. You're right. And it's nice to see that evolution. I know at PacBiz, one of our core values is personal growth. And I'd like to use that as an example where we started with taxi customer calls. And then what we'll be talking about in the next episode, driver calls, that came later on. And part of it was almost a necessity because the technology that's coming into play too.

the technology that's coming into play too. We have a lot of clients where 50, 60, 70% of their calls are handled by automation, by the IVR. And so we're only handling that 30% or 20%. And I think it goes back to why these customer calls are so important. You can't afford to have just some person that you hired, like their first days taking their calls and they don't have any experience about your business when those are the 20% of the calls that are coming in. So the people are maybe they've tried to use the computer system calling in or the AI, the bot, whatever, and it hasn't taken their calls. And now they're upset and they've been trying to talk to somebody. You don't want to have someone that is not trained and not ready answering the phone because they're new on the phones because you keep having turnover. And you talked about that a bit.

They're having issues there with their call center agents where that's our product. That's our service that we do. So that's why we really focus on that part. So we could focus on the call side of things and they could focus on the operations. So, Jake, I just wanted to wrap up with this last thought here about the attrition rate. And you were talking about staff that stick around a long time and for years. Now, unfortunately, we cannot put anybody that comes to us because we're growing. We can't put all people that have been working at Pacbiz for years because our clients that have been with us

for years are expecting those people to stick around. But the thing here with us, if you're hiring someone in the call center and you're in the UK, you're in the US, you're in Canada, the expectation is not that this person is going to be there for years. The expectation is like, we'll see how long they last. come to work at a call center that values them, that cares about the employee, and we want these people to stick around, that's the difference. When people come in to apply, they're starting a career with us. They're expecting, okay, that could be where I might work for the next five, 10 years, versus that's not the expectation they're coming in when they come into work locally. This is like, oh, I'm doing this for now, waiting for the next thing to come around. So that's a big difference.

So even if you're starting with a company and it's starting with new people, it makes a huge difference what that attrition rate is at the call center that you're outsourcing to. So challenge you guys, if you're thinking about outsourcing and you're looking at companies, ask them what their attrition rate is. How many people leave that company in the next year? And that could be the big difference between if you're going to get a great experience for your business or one that you're going to be wishing you made a different choice. So with that, I think that's all the time we have for this episode today. So with that, I think that's all the time we have for this episode today.

The next episode, we're going to be talking and focusing on the driver side of outsourcing and working with call centers. So thank you guys for listening and we'll catch you in the next episode. All right. Thanks, guys.