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TeleVantage
Game Center Group has just recently
invested in state-of-the-art VOIP technology for its offices.
At its most basic the TeleVantage system
functions as a PBX but extends its capabilities far beyond this to a
full blown call center application. Everyone is assigned an
extension, and TeleVantage routes the calls to the correct people.
Being exceptionally easy to administrate, it takes only seconds to
add, remove, or change an extension as needed.
Of course, we wouldn’t be this excited if
that were all it can do. TeleVantage is exceptionally powerful when
applied as a call center solution.
Transferring calls is as simple as
dragging a call from your phone, and dropping it onto one of the
other reps/supervisors/managers that are currently logged in. If you
are a manager or a supervisor, you can monitor any call you like,
from your phone with just a simple right click. If an agent needs
help, you can coach them through a tough call in real time with the
same right click. Finally, any supervisor can join a conversation in
progress just as they would a conference call. This has significant
implications both in terms of quality monitoring and coaching.
TeleVantage has exceptional
organizational power, with the ability to separate agents into
discrete queues and discrete teams, all with heavily modifiable
routing rules. Moving people from one queue or team to another only
takes a few seconds in the Administrator console, and changing
routing rules takes only a few seconds more.
Finally, because the Televantage system
is all VOIP, we can offer extremely aggressive rates for all your
telephony needs.
Simple, streamlined, and effective.
Contact us for a demo today!
Game Center Group Tour!
Sunny
San Diego.
Agents
hard at work.
Don’t
answer that phone!
The
hallway of eternity.
The
boss man.
Offshore Call Center ROI
There are two primary reasons to
outsource in general. One is to reduce overhead, and the other is to
maintain focus on the core business. Your outsource solutions should
be prepared to meet those two goals.
Depending on the industry, offshore
outsourcing can quite handedly meet those two goals. When speaking of
the gaming industry, however, one should be aware of the extremely
high initial investment required to get your offshore agents up to
speed and capable of meeting your two goals. This high initial
investment then creates a relationship that is difficult to exit
later down the road, because most businesses would be remiss to see
that investment simply lost.
The primary stumbling block utilizing an
offshore outsource model is culture. Gaming culture, while quite
prevalent in North America for several years, hasn’t quite caught on
in parts of the rest of the world, especially those parts of the
world where the average person cannot afford to purchase a computer,
a game console, or broadband connection.
Games are something that most of us take
for granted as we have all grown up with them. We all know how to
pick up a controller, and over years of playing, have the hand-eye
coordination to make it work. We know the lingo, we know the history
(everyone waxes fondly over the halcyon days of the Colecovision),
and we know how to approach new games we’ve never played before and
be successful at them.
Now take a step back, and imagine if you
tried to have your parents sit down and play Super Mario Brothers
with you. Imagine teaching them until they were knowledgeable enough
about Super Mario Brothers that they could write an F.A.Q. on it.
Imagine you have a call center full of your parents, un-indoctrinated
people whom you have to train to be experts on your game in order to
support it. Imagine the game is as complicated as an MMO with all its
detail and depth, and you have a pretty good idea of what kinds of
hurdles you’re going to have to jump in order to craft your center
into a full-functioning one.
It’s definitely not as simple as a two
week training process.
You’ll have to make sure that there’s
some sort of assigned time to actually play, and be prepared to argue
about whether that time is paid or not. If it is paid, that’s time
that your agents are not performing their primary duties. If it is
not paid, there needs to be some sort of monitoring process to ensure
that your agents *are* playing and learning their craft. How long
does it take someone who has never played video games, has English as
a second language and is not familiar with western culture to become
proficient enough to actually handle a tier 1 ticket in a
MMO....months and even then the work is sub-par.
If you follow the traditional model of
having a small expert group domestically, expect much of their time
to be spent coaching your outsource agents. If you don’t have a small
expert group, expect to have a full-time training staff dedicated to
the outsource agents in your employ. This means lengthy stays half
way across the globe, time difference issues… and the list goes on.
Couple this with traditionally high
turnover rates (we’re talking anywhere from 30-60%) and the goal of
focusing on your core business starts looking out of reach.
As you can also see, there are hidden
costs here too. Because of the cultural disconnect, productivity will
be lower (since it takes time to find the answers a gamer would know
offhand) as will quality (since answers will be given without
complete understanding, no matter what policies you have in place).
Because of lower productivity, more agents will be needed, offsetting
a percentage of your savings, and of course more agents multiplies
the effort required by your training department in order to get
quality to an acceptable level. And again, the turnover rate here
makes the whole process longer, as you try to develop a core group
that the rest can grow from.
Establishing a stable overseas process
will take time. In our experience, anywhere from one to two years
before things settle down, when quality and production normalize.
It’s only at this point that you can start examining where you can go
with your group, and what their actual potential is. Unfortunately,
so much money and effort has been placed into the endeavor at this
point that, if you realize that your group isn’t going to be able to
perform up to expectations, leaving the relationship becomes
exceptionally costly. How do you explain two years and several
millions of dollars expended without anything to show for it?
While the ostensible savings touted can
range anywhere from 10%-75% over a traditional stateside call center,
those margins shrink every day that the center underperforms. If you
require three heads for every one head that you have domestically
(not counting the extra QA and training infrastructure you’ll have to
invest in), do those savings actually exist? What price do you put on
your players satisfaction? Being shuffled from person to person
because of ineptitude is simply too high a price to pay.
We have had years of experience with
multiple offshore vendors and have built an extremely comprehensive
ROI analysis that uses real world data and experience. Call us today
and let’s work together to find a CRM solution that works…guaranteed.
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Contact:
1.858.435.0803
