Hi. I've been involved in call centers and teleservices programs as a
consultant for 10 years. Your question raises a few of my own
questions.
First, and don't take this personally, but it seems as if you haven't
provided teleservices in the past, and are looking to get started.
Everyone has to start somewhere, obviously, but with no or little
experience, you may not want your first effort to be for a major cable
company.
Even if the decision maker is also inexperienced, I can guarantee that
someone one cubicle over from him has managed outsourced teleservices
providers before, and your practices may get scrutinized with a
magnifying glass if it's apparent that you're not an established
provider.
If you're looking to get started, a suggestion would be to bid for
managing the program, and then subcontract it to an established
provider. Depending on the size of the program, this might mean
working with the largest providers, such as Convergys, Sitel, APAC or
TeleTech, or one of the thousands of small boutiques. You can find
ads for many of these in the back of Customer Interaction Solutions
magazine (http://www.tmcnet.com/ccs/).
For any sort of legitimate program -- and believe me, these days you
must be religious about legal adherence to the new FTC/FCC Do Not Call
rules, the Telemarketing Sales Rule, and a host of state-level
regulations -- the selected provider will work with you to develop
data format specs, scripting, training, reporting requirements, and
operating procedures, such as hours of calling, number of attempts,
etc.
Set-up costs can be waived for very large programs, but generally run
from a few thousand up to $10,000, depending on the complexity of
preparations. Standard hourly costs during set-up, if not included in
a flat fee, are about $75-125 per hour for training development,
systems development and programming.
Production costs (the actual calling) vary. The first question is
whether to charge per contact (yes or no from a decision maker), per
attempt (I'd never sign on for this as a client) or per hour. Per
hour is traditional, but you should expect the client to monitor your
productivity closely, and smart ones will include minimum service
levels (such as 7 contacts per hour) in an hourly contract.
Per call is simple, and allows the client to easily project budgets.
For the provider, it presents some upside...if you can squeeze more
productivity into a paid hour, your profit margin increases.
Actual rates, regardless of which pricing structure is chosen, vary by
the required skill sets for the rep. Generally:
- Business to business is more expensive than business to consumer
- Sales is more expensive than loyalty or customer support
- Tech support is most expensive
- Premium for languages other than English
Cable and telecom companies are the veterans in the teleservices world
(remember my comment about the guy in the cube next to your client?).
For an outbound, follow-up call such as you describe, hourly rates
could be from $19 to $24 for reps located in the US. Offshore
providers (Phillipines, India, Caribbean) can go down to $14.00/hr.
Per call estimates can be calculated by dividing that hourly rate by
expected contacts per hour. Your calls sound like they will probably
be short (3 min) and the contact rate will be high, since you just
serviced the customer and thus, presumably, have good phone number
info. You might estimate 10 contacts per hour. Thus, a safe per
contact charge might be $2-3 dollars.
Keep in mind, if the client can't provide productivity estimates from
a similar program, and you guess wrong, you might get locked into a
per contact rate that actually loses you money. Start with an hourly
rate to set a baseline, and then offer to negotiate a fair per contact
rate.
Again, while this may seem like a simple, profitable business, enter
cautiously. 85% of the cost is people-driven, and the reps you find
also have a huge impact on your success and reputation.
Good luck! |
