Outsourcing: West Corporation Interview (Part 6)

By guest author Tony Scott

Managing in a Truly Flat World

Tony: Do you see your customer base continuing to be predominantly in the United States, or do you look to expand outside of the country with companies in other markets where offering a call center model might be attractive?

Matt: Our clients will predominantly be U.S.-based in the foreseeable future, but we do have a sister company – InterCall – that works with companies around the world. 

Tony: Given the changing environment you are facing and the dispersed workforce both domestically and internationally, what do you think are the key strengths that you are going to need in your leadership team to be able to grow your company over the next three or five years?

Matt: From a management team perspective, I will give you a little bit of history. A few years ago we had facility-based people who managed traditional call centers and also my management team that managed at-home agents. Today I need people who can manage a solution regardless of where the agent is located: offshore, near-shore, domestic, or at-home. I have been developing my team to be able to manage that kind of a solution so that we provide a customer with a single point of representation within our company. I have to have a team that can be creative and proactive in providing solutions to our customers. Particularly in this economy, customers are focused on cost containment while at the same time driving quality.  I think that we can do both if we can be creative and proactive in providing multi-location solutions, and that will help us to grow our business over the next two to three years. I also believe that customers are going to look to their vendors and evaluate them based on who is flexible, proactive, and provides the best solutions at the best cost.

Tony: Have you seen the makeup of your management team shift over the past few years in terms of the skills and backgrounds, in particular as it relates to a domestic versus a global orientation?

Matt: I had a mix of those backgrounds already, so I didn’t change the team; I just brought the teams together to blend them and have them train each other. For example, I have someone who has been part of our at-home model since its incubation. So they are very aware of what we can and can’t do in a virtual environment but probably couldn’t step in and run a traditional call center. I have someone else who can run brick-and-mortar centers in their sleep but probably is not very familiar with an at-home virtual model. I take those two people, I join them at the hip, and they train each other.

Tony: Do you see the virtual model as being the future of your company if you look out five or ten years from now? Is this something that is going to be a much bigger percentage of your mix in the future?

Matt: I think so, for several reasons. First, I think it provides us the flexibility and an alternative demographic that a domestic brick-and-mortar or a hub-and-spoke model may not. Second, from a domestic support standpoint, it allows us to maintain our costs to a degree because we are providing some perks or flexibility to the call center worker that a facility-based agent may not have available, which allows us to attract and retain more qualified people at a somewhat lower cost. I think it ultimately comes back to what is the value: can I provide quality, flexible service at a price point that’s competitive? I think our virtual model does that. Another piece of that is that I don’t have to invest in the real estate to open a new call center. I can go out and add two to three hundred agents relatively quickly through a virtual program as opposed to taking at least ninety days to build out a traditional facility and ramp it from scratch.

Tony: We talked about the potential of your taking the at-home, virtual model global. Given the lower cost of communications, your advantage and expertise of actually having already set this up domestically should provide you with a platform that can be expanded to a very large degree and that is geographically unlimited, doesn’t it?

Matt: Yes, in fact it potentially does.

Tony: If you are going to envision five to ten years from now where your company is going to be, what do you think you are going to look like?

Matt: West Corporation certainly has to continue to take advantage of the technology that we have and provide solutions that take advantage of our core platform. From an agent services standpoint, that means we have to think about how we take advantage of our technologies and the things that we have developed to expand into other markets and into other demographics. At the same time, we have to maintain the level of service that our customers are accustomed to – and do all that without having to go down the traditional path of building call centers and chasing the next low-cost location from a labor arbitrage standpoint. I think our model allows us a tremendous amount of flexibility along these lines without having to spend much capital.

Tony: That’s certainly an interesting aspect of your business model when you start looking at providing outsourced services with a dispersed capability. How you make all those things work together is obviously not a simple thing to do, but if you can, it has great potential.

Matt: Particularly as we move forward with additional services that aren’t necessarily mainstream today but are gaining attraction, such as social networking, I think we have a better opportunity than most.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Outsourcing: West Corporation Interview
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