When selecting a contact center to assist your company, you want more than outsourced services.
You want a partnership: a team of agents and managers that you would have been happy to hire. They not only answer calls and questions, but engage your customers in friendly conversation, enthusiastically representing your brand values.
If this sounds far from what you’ve experienced, you may wonder if it’s even possible to have this type of outsourcing solution.
It’s not only possible, but necessary in a market where customer experience often outweighs price and quality as determining factors in brand loyalty. In order to get there, you need to partner with a contact center that places employees and their training as its highest priorities.
Training: The Secret Ingredient
The right training solves a multitude of challenges, including high attrition rates, poor call resolution times and losing customers due to lackluster service. You might be wondering how a training program can mitigate so many of the common challenges that normally plague in-house contact centers.
It’s true that no ordinary training program can do all of these things. It requires a personalized, innovative approach to training. It’s far more than simply sharing a brand message with a team of agents or a quick orientation before they take their first calls. A true partnership between your contact center agent and your customer requires a belief in customer empathy and a rigorous (but highly positive) training structure.
Our team at Protel BPO, located in Belize City, Belize, from contact center agent to Quality Assurance to Team Lead and upper-level management practices empathy daily. Our rigorous training, called Brand Camp, helps our team with specific skills toward understanding and being sensitive to the needs of each individual customer they connect with. Empathy as a core value also means fewer escalated calls and faster resolved calls, and it shows in our data.
Here are the Five Basic Elements of the Protel BPO Brand Camp:
The Right Team: Any exceptional contact center begins with exceptional candidates. Protel BPO agents are selected from a fast-growing contact center labor pool. In fact, labor shortages aren’t a problem at Protel BPO. In Belize, the contact center industry is the 4th largest in Belize, and growing. Jobs are favored and sought after, and Protel BPO maintains a high retention rate. Not only do we have an enthusiastic labor force, but our ongoing incentives and trainings create an environment where our agents are excited to come to work.
Brand Immersion: Over a two-day intensive session, Protel BPO agents learn not only about products and services, but about values and messaging, even learning the specific phrases you prefer they use and those they should avoid. Working closely with our leadership, the atmosphere is positive, generous and motivated toward one shared goal: Our clients’ success.
Integrated Agent & Leadership: A Brand Camp approach is an open-door environment, encouraging the interaction between agents and managers for exceptional service.
Ongoing Incentives: With the right incentive program, agents want to keep learning about the brand, developing their communications skills and progressing toward better and better service.
Daily Refocus: At Protel BPO, Brand Camp never ends; daily reminders of the brand values and identity occur in the context of updates about promotions or the highlighting of a particular product line.
A Real-Life Example of Protel BPO Brand Camp in Action
When a Fortune 500 retailer closed many of its brick-and-mortar stores during the pandemic, they required the services of a contact center services provider to handle customer service for their online sales.
The retailer partnered with a contact center that fully embraces the Brand Camp approach. The retailer was highly involved in Brand Camp, and not just at the beginning, but on an ongoing basis, even stationing an employee at the contact center to be a part of the team.
In the early stages of Brand Camp, the retailer equipped contact center agents with three weeks of training and presented them with a 500-page step-by-step guide to handling every possible customer request, inquiry and challenge.
As the agents began serving the retailer’s customers, detailed reporting assisted the leadership from both companies to determine how to shape ongoing training items. They also were able to closely track KPIs, such as Average Order Value.
In addition to the on-site retail employee, a corporate team from the retailer visits regularly, which allows the two companies to enjoy shared values and goals. It’s an arrangement that works far better than a simple contact center and client relationship.
Hear From the Protel Team:
Two employees of Protel BPO share about their experiences with serving the retailer with a Brand Camp approach.
“What makes us different is that we use several different case studies or scenarios that actually happened in weeks prior and we use those to add to the agenda for the training with the supervisors and QA’s.
We seize every opportunity to improve the way our agents serve our brands. It is the process of having constant meetings, communication, email and really teaching them and showing them where they need improvement. We praise them when they do well and post it on the blog, we give bonuses, we give incentives. We try to get them excited about doing well; making sure they want to be here and are willing to go the extra mile for our clients.”
–Illiana Pollard, Operations Manager
“I’m a certified teacher, so I have my license and everything to teach kids, but I love working at the contact center for this retailer. So, I teach what I love.
It’s not really like hard work; we work hard but we have a family culture. We know everyone. We talk to everyone.
You will meet the owner. You will meet the CEO. You meet them in the breakroom and even when the clients come it’s like they’re not restricted. We all talk to each other. There’s an open door policy for all of the campaigns and all of the managers and QA’s and all levels. It helps you to stay with your employer, cause we’re at work, but work feels like home because of the openness.”
–Moesha Ifield, Trainer
Why Protel BPO Embraces the Brand Camp Model
At Protel BPO, the company culture focuses on taking care of people as the top resource and top priority. While it may not seem immediately obvious why prioritizing employees would lead to better results for clients, it has proven to be a reliable business model.
“Basically, who we are is our employees. We try to invest a lot in terms of our facilities; we try to invest a lot in technology, but when it comes down to it, what we really do is about people.”
–Kevin Herrera, CEO
With attractive incentives and a development approach that promotes from within, Protel BPO employees know they are valued and that they have a future at Protel BPO. This translates into contact center agents that enjoy their jobs and appreciate the opportunity to serve customers.
If you are simply looking for a contact center services provider, there are plenty of options available. But if you are interested in developing an integrated service model with a business partner that adds value, look for a contact center that uses a comprehensive training approach and values its employees as its greatest asset.
About the Author
Kevin Herrera is Founder, CEO, Protel BPO.
About Protel BPO
Located in Belize, Protel BPO is a nearshore contact center service provider that offers unparalleled service, competitive rates and highly trained agents working as an extension of your company. Founded on a culture that rewards agents with fair wages, incentives and a positive work environment, Protel BPO has created a setting where happy, engaged employees offer the best customer experiences. Learn more at www.protelbpo.com.
