Thought Leaders in Outsourcing: Interview with John Meyer, CEO of Arise Virtual Solutions (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I think there is a huge unmet need of women looking for flexible jobs while raising children. This is a category that is under-served and is looking for work, and looking for ways to make money and raise families. That is why it doesn’t surprise me that this is the bulk of your workforce. When I mentioned freelancers, you made a specific point in saying that they were home-based businesses. Why did you make that point?

John Meyer: We have a B2B relationship with them and in some cases – about 10% of the those who are working in our network – people are employees of other independent businesses. We have a relationship with independent companies. They may set up a company and bring other people into their business, but our interaction with them is a subcontract as opposed to freelance. They are a subcontractor, we contract with them and tell them, “You have these certain requirements, your statement of work and a master service agreement.” It is truly a B2B relationship because when you ask individuals who work with us what they do for a living, they will tell you that they run their own business. That is a sense of pride that carries over to what they are able to do. That is a very important thing of Arise as a company.

SM: So you require people to be registered as a business before you take them on?

JM: Exactly. We sign master service agreements with them and statements of work on a quarterly basis, stating the criteria their business will be measured on, because we are a highly metric industry. Clients provide the criteria, and we pass those on to the individual. The caliber of the people we are able to bring in relative to the people who would sit eight hours a day in a physical location far exceeds what they normally have. Individuals who are part of our network blow away the skill levels and metrics a typical call center would be measured by.

SM: Tell us a bit more about how you source these people.

JM: Half of the people are referrals. It is very unfortunate that there are a lot of potential scams on the web. A lot of these Internet scams degrade the caliber of your being able to recruit somebody solely online. So about half of the people come through referrals – a neighbor, somebody in their church group, etc. They talk about the ability to work when you want to work. They have to work 15 to 20 hours per week, but we don’t care if they work 15 to 20 hours straight, if they want to work five hours on Tuesday to Thursday, and so on. The network is big enough to meet our clients’ demand by letting our people work when they want to work. The nature of this is that some people don’t get to chose the hours they necessarily want, because we let the best performing individuals pick their hours first. Because people get paid on a productive minute basis, what you will find is that the best people pick the busiest hours. They pick the busiest hours because that is when they can make the most money.

From a client perspective, we are able to say, “Think about it. The best people are taking the majority of the calls and with the best results. Isn’t that what you want?” We break the days into half-hour increments, and we are able to put on a board how many people you want for this particular hour all the way throughout an entire day. We are able to supply people’s customers – the supply and demand curve is almost identical. Because we are able to do that, we squeeze costs out of where it was typically a brick-and-mortar center in addition to the capital cost of having a building, technology equipment, etc. We can offer our service 25% cheaper than an onshore brick-and-mortar and still not take money out of the individual agents’ pockets.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Outsourcing: Interview with John Meyer, CEO of Arise Virtual Solutions
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