Thought Leaders in Outsourcing: Interview with John Meyer, CEO of Arise Virtual Solutions (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about another customer scenario. When you introduced the model, you were very specific about certain people, like diabetics. What kinds of requirements are you seeing from your customers, and what do you do to source people with those kinds of profiles?

John Meyer: I mentioned referrals before, but we also use more traditional media to track people. We leverage the crowd. Some networks are self-propagating, because the more people you get and are treated well will tell everyone else, and it becomes a growing area.

In the specific case of diabetics, we just went out to the existing network and said: “Listen, here is what we are looking for – people with these characteristics.” We had 900 individuals who were already in the network who could fulfill those particular requirements. Sometimes it is work experience, where they are looking for sales skills, for example. Sometimes they are looking for particular geographic accidents. Sometimes they are looking for language. “Are you a Spanish speaker?” Maybe they are looking for people who speak French from Quebec. When they give us those characteristics, we reach out to the crowd and tell them what we are looking for. Then we will get a large number of people saying that they are interested and that they want more information. We inform them of what the expectations are, what the associated compensation is, what the revenue is they would gain from interacting with us, and what other unique things they might need.

Sometimes a customer has a specific technology requirement. We start with background checks so we know what we are dealing with – if they are credible and if they are someone we would advocate to our clients. Then we do voice assessments. Much of this is done electronically in a matter of minutes. But we want to assess if they are comfortable on the phone and if they have a grasp of how to put words together so they can interact with clients. Then we run a psychographic/demographic test to see if they have more empathy for customer service or if they are more of a sales-oriented person. Do they have certain technical skills, as customers want to know different characteristics of their mobile phones, for example? Then we will tell them: “Here is where your strengths are, and this is where you might have some weaknesses.”

But at the end of the day, they chose what client they want to work for. That is a very important tenant of the Arise model because the business owners have the ability to choose somebody they think they can provide the best value for. The majority of the time it works out, because as we run them through this certification process, we tell them where we think they are strong and where not. They don’t always follow our advice, but sometimes people see those big dollar signs around sales and want to go work in the sales area. At a minimum everybody makes minimum wage, but when they see they can make $25 [an hour] selling, even though they said they were not a good salesperson, they want to do that. And we allow them to do it.

When they succeed, all power to them. If they don’t succeed, we tell them that it may be better to go to customer service, because it is something they are going to be successful at. At the end of the day, we want to create a good experience for our customers – the big Fortune 2000 companies – and the independent business owners, because we look at these independent business owners as CEOs. They are in fact CEOs of their own companies.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Outsourcing: Interview with John Meyer, CEO of Arise Virtual Solutions
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