Outsourcing: Chris Coles, President And CEO Of HyperQuality (Part 2)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Aditya Modi

Sramana: So, let me see if I’ve got this right. You audit the objectives, then you edit the process as it pertains to those objectives, then you audit the tools and mechanisms of implementing those, and finally you audit the calls?

Chris: We audit the calls, then we take a look at the duty analysis and share with the client organization the observations, areas of improvement, and areas that are doing well, so that they’ve got that information. Based on their work with us and their own understanding, we can take action to adjust what is actually occurring in those interactions.

Sramana: Who hires you? Does the end client hire you to do the contacts and to audit?

Chris: Yes, yes. It’s typically done by enterprise organizations, which oftentimes have their own centers. They have outsourcing centers onshore and offshore. Centers focus on sales. Others focus on customer service, tech support, and collection. It is a wide array of subject matter that can be covered.  The same principles typically apply.

Sramana: And how many customers do you have?

Chris: Today, we are about 35.

Sramana: What is the average deal size?

Chris: It is probably only $40,000 to $60,000 a month. But there again, that can vary quite a bit depending on the depth of our engagement within a company and, frankly, the size of the company. As we spread our practices, it can be multiples larger than that. In the early stages, it may be smaller than that. It also, of course, depends on what portion or which stage of the work we are in. If a given company feels as though they have their processes already pinned down and can basically take us through them, then there wouldn’t necessarily be a business process and analysis step. On the other hand, according to that analysis, then the dollar value, of course, can vary.

Sramana: And you are about an $11 million company?

Chris: Yes. In the past we were. It is actually a little more now, but in that range.

Sramana: And you said you’ve been around for about eight years, yes?

Chris: We have.

Sramana: So, the 35 customers you worked with over the eight years, this practice that you have built, what were some of the strategies that you deployed to understand that this is the business you want to build, to execute on building this business?

Chris: Well, I think that the lessons throughout the life of the company are probably principally rooted in using objective quantitative analytic methods to understand what is happening and then applying prudent management domain expertise to interpret it for a given company. A lot of these companies have teams with them – or teams that are within their other vendor partners – who have similar missions or objectives. The difference for us is it’s all that we do. In that sense, our objective is to understand as discreetly, specifically, and actionably as possible what is happening in the content slopes and where the opportunities are? Where are things going well? Where should processes and people be acknowledged if they are doing good work, or where are things breaking down?

Sramana: Basically, you have developed specialization and core competency in this kind of qualitative and quantitative assessment and fine-tuning of contacts and processes.

Chris: Right, and then we build the software around it to automate those flows and put those tools, at least in some considerable measure, in the hands of clients and customers if they choose to do it for themselves, or if they want to do partly with us and partly for themselves.

Sramana: Let’s talk about those two things. First, what kind of software you have built? And second, how does your organization operate? How have you built your organization to deliver on this value proposition?

Chris: Touching on the software first, what we have done over the course of eight years is go through three generations of software. The most recent version is ClearMetrix. It’s referenced on the website. What it does is take the lessons from the first two generations and flip them into a software as a service model. The software has a number of specific attributes and capabilities. Probably the most notable is a highly configurable data structure, which is flexible to certainly the vast majority of approaches that our clients have or envision for analyzing this unstructured data, whether it be different storing methodologies, introducing different attributes that are outside of the call that may explain things like tenure, compensation, and location of an agent or of a customer. So, it becomes a very high-value source of data and insight both on its own as well as with other data sources to give these enterprise clients a lot of information about what is working and what is not.

In addition to the evolving database structure, there is workflow built in. There are analytics, all of which come together to enable enterprises to manage what historically has been a series of islands, often typified by contact centers. Where there is a need to get a unified view, that has been elusive at best for many or most customers because you find different islands, different centers operate on different systems, different recording, different hours of operation, you name it. Pulling that all together and putting it through unified filters, unified calibration among participants, is manual and challenging. So, what you end up with is differences in performance that should be manageable, that can be performance managed to a level that is within reach. There are certain attributes, of course, that may be cultural differences or other things that play in. To the extent that you can minimize the other operating attributes, you can get them to a pretty consistent look across your entire portfolio regardless of country or where the customer is located.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Outsourcing: Chris Coles, President And CEO Of HyperQuality
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