Center to improve customer experience

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January 11, 2012

By Will Broaddus Staff Writer The Salem News Wed Jan 11, 2012, 05:00 AM EST

Everybody has been on the phone with someone from a call center and probably had steam coming out of their ears at the time. OnBrand24, a call center in the Cummings Center in Beverly with 120 employees, wants to make that experience a little more pleasant.

To do that, the company recently received a workforce training grant of $95,700 from the Massachusetts Office of Labor and Workforce Development.

The money will be used to train their employees in advanced customer services and sales skills.

The training will be provided by Sandler Training in Salem.

The Salem News spoke with OnBrand24 CEO Mark Fichera, who purchased the company in 2005, when it was called Pike Communications.

OnBrand24 means ...?

We represent several different brands, and (our sales agents) are representing other companies as if they actually worked for that different brand; 24 refers to the fact that we're (working) 24/7, 365 days a year.

What kinds of calls do you handle?

Inbound, mostly customer-service calls for e-commerce or technology companies, where help-desk support calls are coming in. We do order processing, customer service. On the outbound side, primarily lead generation and appointment-setting and sales.

What do the business-to-business calls involve?

The customer will give us a list of their customers, and it's a cold call. We send that lead or appointment over to our client. Sometimes we're the inside sales team and turn that lead over to their sales force.

How many customers do you have, and how is business?

We have 85 customers. We're growing 15 to 20 percent a year, since 2005. We're hiring.

Did you want to use the grant to address any particular aspects of your business?

It's for both inbound customer service and outbound. You have to make a case why you should get the money, such as, it's going to grow your business, it's going to hire people, it's going to be put to good use. It's like a $95,000 grant. They don't just give it to you, we have to match that — at least match that. They actually want you to put in more (than the amount of the grant).

And what was the case you made?

The case was to give us a competitive advantage. We typically are competing with call centers offshore, in India and the Philippines in particular. I can't compete with (those) people on a price basis, but I can in terms of service. A way to differentiate ourselves is having a superior agent — upping the skill level of these people by training them. We don't want to ship jobs offshore, we want to keep them here in Beverly.

What other qualities distinguish your call center from the competition?

It's a very customized approach. Typically, some of the larger call centers have people working out of their homes, especially offshore.

We have everyone here in Beverly, so there's better performance monitoring. There's collaboration of agents in the same room, a team approach. Managers are always working the aisles and can redirect people on the fly. Quality assurance would be the overriding term.

What does the new training help agents to handle?

On the outbound side, handling sales objections, getting through the gatekeeper, techniques to make the call more streamlined and improving the results. On the customer service side, handling irate callers, making the calls handling objections. Up-selling, cross-selling.

Is there a key to these techniques?

An upbeat attitude. The idea that you can control your own destiny.

How do the training sessions work?

It's hands-on, with role-playing, very high-energy. It's formal training classes; we typically have 12 to 15 agents in a class, putting each agent through 50 hours of training for the year.

How is it different from the training you normally give your workers?

We do training here that is specific to our products and services. This is generic training that they wouldn't normally get, which you would normally only get at a Fortune 500 company.

Is it having an effect?

The agents come back enthused.

Is a big part of your business supplying sales agents to companies that can't afford one?

Yes, absolutely. As people have layoffs and things like that, fluctuations in revenue, they can't afford to hire all these kinds of people.

So you enter into contracts with people for how long?

Usually six months to a year.

Typically, we don't have long-term contracts, but we do have long-term relationships — we have clients that have been with us for 15 or 20 years — so we have to improve our performance.

It's very performance-based. If they don't get leads, they don't hire us.

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