If you take a stopwatch and record the time you spend on web sites, you might notice that Facebook takes an unprecedented amount of time you spend on the Internet over the rest of the other web sites combined. Indeed, Facebook has now topped the charts in terms of daily usage (see Chart of the Day: Facebook’s Unbelievable Effect On The Rest Of The Web). Of course, there are contraries to the rule where a rare few of our friends even bother to browse their Facebook account on a regular basis, much less join the social media behemoth. Still, it is very certain we will soon be communicating and collaborating altogether through Facebook.

So, in the spirit of old “Hacker Ethic” of sharing information to everyone else, here are a few things you may want to consider using to fully utilize it as your means to creating conversations with your network of peers and acquaintances without having to use other applications, cloud or otherwise.

Your Facebook E-mail Account is Now Available

One of the last vestiges of online tools outside the purview of Facebook is everyone’s ability to send and receive messages by e-mail to each other. Now, Facebook has opened that gateway, giving all its users an @facebook.com account, and completing the list of online messaging tools for networking, communicating and collaborating with family, friends and acquaintances.

This means you do not need to get out of Facebook to conduct your e-mail activities. You can send messages with file attachments (though I have not tested the maximum file size that you can send). It’s funny that Facebook has decided not to allow you to encode the “subject title” and just uniformly entitles every message that you send to an e-mail address as “Conversation with <Your-Facebook-Profile-Name>”.

For now, I suggest that you keep your business and professional life outside this e-mail tool. As Facebook has been since time a memorial, you can use your @facebook.com account within the bounds of your social life.

Please go to the Facebook Help Center to learn how to set up your @facebook.com e-mail account.

Groups and Pages – Which One Is Better?

The answer is “both.” After going through so many changes and iterations over the years, today’s Facebook Group and Facebook Page work so differently from its inception. Let me explain the differences and how you should and can use these for your marketing intentions.

First, memorize this:

Facebook Group is to a “Country Club” as Facebook Page is to a “Celebrity.”

This is my personal description because this is exactly how you are going to use either community tool as a means of networking to the entire Facebook world without having to be their “friend” in Facebook.

When you are trying to market yourself or your entity, it is better to create a Page so people can “Like” your page and follow every post you make, akin to a celebrity status. You give the freedom of choice to all Facebook users to “Like” your page, and promoting it is your followers’ decision to do so or not. A virtual “Word of Mouth” marketing transpires within your page as you bellow out announcements and campaigns that drive enthusiasm and excitement about you or your entity. Whether you’re a real celebrity or not, your every move in your Facebook Page should be to act like you are a real celebrity. Not doing so defeats the benefits of maintaining a Facebook Page.

Now, the Facebook Group is a different animal altogether. That’s why the analogy I’m asking you to use is that of a “Country Club.” This is a members-only community inside Facebook where people who form part of the group share a common interest. But instead of the freedom of join the group, members can add their friends without their permission. It’s like pulling your friends into the registration desk through a proxy signup. Once a member, the vertical menu items to the left of their Facebook home page lists the groups they belong to and a highlighted number displaying the total new posts posted in the group.

Where in the past you can message-blast using Groups, that function has now been transferred to the Facebook Page. Rather, Facebook Group members are notified of posts in the left-hand vertical list, including on-page and e-mail notifications, while both Facebook Group and Page posts will appear on your wall.

A word on the power of “The Internet is All About Conversations”: the moment you remove your followers or members’ ability to post messages, links and photos on the wall, you may lose their following or membership, not unless you already think of yourself as too famous a celebrity or a powerhouse business behemoth it doesn’t matter if they follow you or not.

Marketing and Selling in Facebook

If you are using both Facebook and LinkedIn, you should have come to the conclusion that Facebook is social and LinkedIn is business. But why is it that businesses still create Groups and Pages inside Facebook knowing it’s nothing more than a very huge cocktail party? Precisely because it is a very big cocktail party that many individuals of those business groups and pages want to get into the social networking and begin cold-calling, marketing and selling their products and services. Do you think LinkedIn is also a gigantic cocktail party?

Here’s the clincher: it is the individual, who works for the business that owns the Facebook Group or Facebook Page, that markets the products and services of the organization (non-profit institutions also need to market themselves). If it is the individual, then why bother create business-like Facebook Groups and Pages? The answer lies in community-building.

Communities are groups or clans of people with similar likes. Through human history, clans have developed organizational hierarchy to administer how the community should operate and collaborate. So, the more freedom you provide, the bigger your Facebook Group or Facebook Page grows. In contrast, the more policies you institute – barriers to open collaboration – the smaller your clan will be. Free will, freedom of choice, democratic values and all that jazz have been the founding pillars of the Internet and the World Wide Web; no one person or entity owns either. It is a collaborative effort to make the web work as it is today. So, why institute restrictions and barriers in your Facebook Group and Facebook Page, like not allowing members and followers to post messages on the wall or administering who should join (for Pages)?

Regardless of the Facebook Groups and Facebook Pages you created and manage, the idea behind using social networking to market is the sincerity of the individual to represent yourself or your entity so that members and followers develop “trust” to continue being part of your community. You have to be “real” when it comes to social media. You cannot be yourself in the real world but then become someone else in Facebook; that lie and deception will catch up with you and may spring the end of your long-term relationship with everyone – a list of members or followers which took you months, if not years, to build.

Facebook is Now Called Middle Earth

A huge caboodle of today’s online marketing happens in Facebook. From Groups and Pages to Apps and Links, most successful individuals and entities have realized the beckoning of this social media behemoth as the center of the online world. Fine if you have a web site that links each other, but run your web statistics over and over again and you may come to realize a lot of the successful campaigns have started to emanate from Facebook. Once in a while people use Digg or StumbleUpon to, well, stumble upon your web site. But the lure of clicking that square-shaped, blue-colored capital letter “F” on a web site is more enticing than today’s RSS Feed or LinkedIn link. People have begun relying on Facebook as the single source of information that is relevant, useful and trusting. It is trusting because friends recommended it. Even the rare spam and virus-laden links from friends come up to be trusting, though wise friends immediately post a disclaimer, writing, “That wasn’t me!”

But be careful not to hard-sell or short-change people. Again, much as traditional advertising built brands out of trust so, too, shall your Facebook profile, Groups and Pages be built out of trust and sincerity. Market yourself as an expert on real estate, not repeated posts on the thing or item you are trying to sell. Market yourself into one specific business category. For example, many people who know me associate the phrase “call center” to my name. Most don’t know what it is about call centers I do – they just know this simple equation: Raffy Pekson = Call Centers. If you keep marketing yourself, your Facebook Group or your Facebook Page upon endless streams of many categories, people will get confused. Once confused, there goes your market. So, be extra careful.

As more people make Facebook their breakfast cereal and midnight snack, the entire world is now revolving around it. It is not an addiction – it is the new world order to which information is now being passed around. People of the older generation will disagree; however, statistics is already proving how Facebook is fast becoming the real portal to culture, ethnicity, habit and lifestyle. Though Google is trying to pounce on Facebook with its recent introduction of Google-Plus, I still believe the Facebook habit is one that’s as human as ice cream – habits die hard!

Are you taking part in the biggest cocktail party in the world? Have you established your real estate space in social media? Heck! Are you still relying, hoping and praying that people will visit your web site “FIRST” before Facebook?

I kid you not. Facebook is now the central habit of so many people today. Facebook is their early morning news show, daily newspaper, gossip columns, corner coffee shop, community center and park. It’s the early-morning tête-à-tête with BFFs and a lot of LOLs, and the noisiest after-office cocktail party with the who’s who and who’s not. To be seen and heard is now more important than to see, read and listen. Social and professional opportunities will not anymore happen out of hope or coincidence in the social media world – you have to take part, be seen and be heard.

It’s not too late to start. But start correctly. Ask advise from people who you perceive are doing it properly. Investigate profiles, groups and page, and see who does things better than others. Experiment as I did since 2008, creating so many groups and pages, buying too many domain names, blogging left and right, and so on. You will find for yourself and from others what will click for you or your entity, and what won’t. Learn, adjust and continue.

And good luck, too!

Back in 2002, I used to work for Atlantic Tele-Center (ATC), a call center company with operations in Miami, Florida, Guyana in South America and St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. ATC was owned by the U.S. telecommunications company Atlantic Tele-Network, Inc. (Nasdaq: ATNI) headquartered at St. Thomas. VoiceLog, the largest third-party verification company at that time, was one of its clients and I headed the team that set up, managed and maintained ATC’s call center software in the cloud, then called Application Service Provider (ASP), for VoiceLog. This way, their at-home agents and supervisors (home-based workforce) could access the software by way of each one’s home DSL connection and home phone. Besides managing technology for VoiceLog (IT folks call this managed service), we also provided 24×7 technical support to the entire at-home workforce, especially when at-home agent profiles were locked because of unanswered customer calls.

During a time when unified messaging was not available, support was also provided by chat through AOL’s instant messaging service. Supervisors would IM my team about VoiceLog agents who couldn’t receive calls or connect to the cloud-based software, and so on. Overall, the year-long project worked well and only minor issues ensued.

Fast track to today and Filipinos ask themselves why is it that almost a decade ago, at-home agent operations works well in the U.S. and it doesn’t seem to get a good head start in the Philippines. Despite the Filipino’s dominance in the call center world, with its advantages in American linguistics and culture (“as American as apple pie”), shouldn’t it follow that the country already began employing at-home agents a few years back? Or even last year or this year?

I’m sure there are a few of them out there but the mass culture of at-home agents never really took off in the Philippines and call center companies, big or small, still continue to rent enclosed office spaces lined up with tens and hundreds of workstations wired to dozens of servers and integrated into its global private network.

Let me describe five major factors that should seriously be considered to make the at-home agent program work for any type of business in the Philippines (not just call center companies), and how to implement each of these on a practical standpoint.

1. CONNECTIVITY

Though home DSL connection in the Philippines have improved that past decade, it is still not at par to provide the best quality VOIP service that large call centers want it to. It’s not speed that’s important – it’s uninterrupted connectivity between the home computer and the cloud-based servers. A majority of home DSL users surf the web, access e-mail, use Facebook or Google, but hardly run VOIP programs like Skype or Google Talk. This means only (browser) data is being fetched and sent between the home computer and the web servers their browsers try to access, not voice (data packets). The old stand-alone computer days of using Cyclic Redundancy Checks (CRC) is similarly being used when you surf the net – if your web browser cannot connect to the web servers, your browser will retry connectivity several times until it successfully connects. Some web programs like YouTube also buffer data to provide a near-to-seamless view of their videos. This is not the case with VOIP. VOIP cannot live with these packets of interruptions that are called “timeouts.” VOIP needs uninterrupted connectivity.

Photo by kirklau at Flickr.com

After having used most DSL and cable internet providers in the Philippines, including the wireless ones, I’ve stuck it out with Globe Telecom’s DSL because it has the least amount of timeouts during an extended duration of use. Globe’s DSL may not have the best burst of download speed but it sure beats all others with the least amount of timeouts in my locations – Makati and Taguig.

How Do You Do It: Your business must conduct connectivity tests between your at-home agent’s home computer and your service provider’s cloud-based VOIP servers. “Ping tests” are the usual first-level tests. More comprehensive tests may include measuring Jitter, QoS (quality of service), MOS (mean opinion score) and packet loss that assess VOIP quality (I always use MyVOIPSpeed test by VisualWare). The connectivity test has to be done several times, at certain points of the day, to get a better overview of your at-home agent’s home DSL connection. Never assume that your at-home agent’s home DSL connectivity is workable even if they are subscribed to Globe’s DSL; telecommunications companies in the Philippines have different degrees of connectivity that depends on location. Other internet providers actually do better than Globe at other localities.

2. VOIP SOLUTION

There were several small call centers averaging 5 to 10 seats that started using the MagicJack system during the time when the maker of that device did not limit the number of calls per day. However, after testing this solution, I found out that it hogged as much as 250 kbps during a call. That’s a problem for your at-home agent’s home DSL connection because even if they lease a 1 Mbps subscription (that’s the maximum download burst speed, not a steady stream), all home DSL providers’ 1 Mbps subscription plan only allow a maximum upload burst of 250 kbps (or one-fourth of the download speed). Maximum isn’t always available. Thus, there will be moments of poor quality of the conversation leading to timeouts.

Photo by avaya at Flickr.com

Hosted solutions (also known as SaaS) being offered today mean that all the expensive servers and its operating systems and application software required to run your customer sales, marketing, service and support operations are owned by a third-party provider and leases (or rents) resource time to you and your at-home agents on preset terms, i.e. monthly subscription. What you and your at-home agents just need to have is a computer running a web browser like Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox where you enter the web address or URL of the hosted solution and do your thing. There are simple PBX hosted solutions and more complex hosted call center solutions out there, sometimes called cloud-based software or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

How Do You Do It: You have to make sure that the hosted IP-PBX or VOIP solution your at-home agents will be using should not exceed 100 kbps both ways. Otherwise, it will be difficult to realize good voice quality during customer contact, just like the MagicJack example above. Remember, besides the VOIP bandwidth requirement, your IP-PBX, VOIP or hosted call center solution will also need to refresh your at-home agent’s screen, meaning additional bandwidth. Therefore, you must conduct voice tests through live test calls between your at-home agent’s home computer and the origination or termination points, i.e. calls originating or terminating in the United States, before you allow your at-home agent to accept or place live calls.

3. CULTURE

It’s not about discipline but more of the culture of the Filipino. It takes some time for a typical Filipino family to understand the difference between work and play, or the work-at-home mind-set. Doing work at home has always been somewhat of a taboo because family members see the humble abode as it is – a place to relax, get together with family members, and do things that are seen as personal and comfortable. Thus, conducting uninterrupted, continuous hours of work at home is not impossible but a challenge.

A well established, multinational call center company in the Philippines tried the at-home agent method and failed because the inborn Filipino culture and value system treated the home as a family’s turf. For example, when the at-home agent’s spouse demands their time, the former can’t negate that exact moment no matter how trivial it is, lest he or she allows that little issue to balloon into a marital World War III. It may take some time for the spouse and the other family members to form the habit of not disturbing the first-time at-home agent.

Photo by at ikaw_ay_pinoy Flickr.com

Another negative impact is ambient noise. A huge majority of would-be at-home agents do not live in posh, gated villages where the constant noise of pedestrian and vehicular traffic are almost non-existent. Lucky you if the at-home agent lives outside the city and in a place where the only background noise would be birds chirping. Many Filipinos do not have a sound-proof room in their house unless they so desire to build one specifically for this type of job. It would be one for the record books to hear a customer to ask the at-home agent, “What was that noise?” and we could only imagine the comical answer coming from your at-home agent, “Oh, that was a five-passenger motorcycle passing by.”

How Do You Do It: Always ask your at-home agent applicant to describe his or her workplace inside the house, specific to the details of construction materials used for the room including a rough-draft floor plan of the house, a vicinity map and where public transportation ply about, the volume of pedestrians passing by, animals living inside and near the home, and many more items you should consider before hiring the at-home agent. If you have a Sound Level Meter at hand, ask the at-home agent applicant to bring it home. Then, there’s also the interview about family members living at home, their routine and schedules, babies to tend to, kids to take care of after school, sleeping hours, and so on. In summary, you need to know the exact living and working conditions, and lifestyle habits of your at-home agent applicant down to the nitty-gritty detail so you know what to expect.

4. AGE

I mentioned previously of the well-established, multinational call center company in the Philippines experimenting with an at-home agent program and failing on it. Even before the year ended, they folded the project and absorbed some of the agents into their office-like centers. Some of the reasons for the failure were the factors I mentioned above. However, the other major factor was  maturity, or the lack of it. But it is difficult to measure maturity and so, the better way to categorize this section is to use “age” when recruiting at-home agents.

Statistically (based on the 2008 Philippine Contact Centre Industry Benchmarking Report by CallCentres.net), about 80% of the call center agent workforce in the Philippines belongs to the 18-34 years old age bracket where almost half are ages 18 to 24. Another related fact about the industry is that 60% of its employed population is female. In a closed office environment where team leaders, supervisors, managers and senior executives are physically near the agents, on-demand supervision is the norm and productivity can be managed on the spot. But at home, there are no supervisors or managers. The at-home agent is on his or her own to manage their productivity and discipline to the best of their ability. This requires maturity, and maturity generally grows as one ages.

How Do You Do It: Though it may seem discriminating to do so, it is reasonable that your best bet for hiring at-home agents should generally be no younger than 35 years old. Also, the female psyche of maturity still holds more weight because this gender group can do better in multitasking than its equivalent. Multitasking is necessary in a home environment and women are genetically good at juggling every activity at home, being born homemakers, generally speaking. A married spouse with no full-time job that’s about 40-50 years old (life begins at 40, eh?) will probably be a better at-home agent, especially if her kids are already in high school, attending college or university or best, in the daily grind of a job. True, there is always an exception to the rule. So, always use your good judgment and sound interview techniques to find out if a younger at-home agent applicant possesses the required maturity and at-home multitasking skils you so desire.

5. THE REST OF THE SKILLS

I’m not going to go through the other work-related, project-specific skills you need for your sales, marketing, service and support campaign, be it in a captive or outsourced corporate environment. You may be thinking of hiring at-home agents to conduct Philippine local calls, not necessarily in an outsourced situation where your agents receive calls from U.S. customers. “The rest of the skills” mean the ability of your at-home agent to express and communicate properly, common sense, technical skills, and so on. That’s up to you.

Photo by kingratt82 at Flickr.com

IN SUMMARY

So, the at-home agent idea can actually work in the Philippines (and probably other Asian or developing nation) if all these five factors are seriously considered and even enhanced. This makes work more available to the Filipino homemaker whose responsibilities have now been diminished – kids all working or married, spouse is still a workaholic and wouldn’t think of retiring, too tiring to get a part-time field sales job, and other things that makes your work-at-home program more appealing than anything else.

However, these are not surefire ways of successfully implementing an at-home agent operation. Motivation, skills training, professional development and a bigger sense of understanding about the at-home agent work have to come from you, and how to go about conducting these activities is another thing worthwhile to consider. So, don’t quote me as saying, “Hey! Raffy said this and that.” Based on my experience, knowledge and practical intuition, I listed these few, major items that need to be addressed before attempting to employ an at-home agent program. But if you become successful, do let me know so we can inform the entire country that truly the at-home agent program can work in the Philippines using “Your Way!”

One of the new things I recently did that’s been in existence for some time now is to get a USA telephone number, particularly a particular New York area code, so that my Mom can call me anytime using local toll charges. It took me about ten minutes to do it, only because it was the first time I did so. Now, people who probably wanted to talk to me from the United States can now do so without thinking out loud how much it would cost them to call me long distance. The hesitation to talk to me is gone!

Social Media is a great tool to market yourself to the global community. From LinkedIn to Facebook and Twitter, to name a few, it’s easy to use but not so easy to master. “Mastering” social media isn’t about the keystrokes, clicks and web pages you need to know to use; it’s knowing how to use it, sort of a “rules of engagement” kind of dos and don’ts in the social media realm. Examples would be the limit of Tweets or messages you post periodically (daily and weekly), the type of status messages and links you share, and so on goes the list. Before you embark on your social media spree, ask yourself this question: who do I want to be in the social media sphere?

Be yourself. First rule of social media is not to hide who you are – it’s to enhance the positive attributes about yourself. No one’s perfect in the world but if you lock your positive attributes to someone else, chances are there’s bound to be some compatible traits. LinkedIn allows you to create your professional credentials that permit people to conclude if you’re worth the employee or the business partner they’re looking for. It’s very easy to create a long and wonderful list that may eventually bore the reader; or using terms and descriptions that nobody really understands and, thus, not easily searchable. It becomes more difficult to create your persona on a medium such as Facebook because it is a very social channel rather than boasting your professional triumphs. Then, there’s LinkedIn Group, Facebook Pages and a whole caboodle of things to create. Read my “Social Media – If You Build It, They Will Come!” post to learn more about building your social media profile correctly.

After all the building and marketing in social media, what happens next? People usually search you out and begin the conversation with a message – or vice versa if the messaging begins with you. Here’s the clincher to a successful sale – stop the messaging! People are (generally) by nature devout conversationalists who seek verbal words over written ones. Our history is filled with stories of (flea) markets as the center of sales and marketing that necessitates conversations over written messages. The Cluetrain Manifesto describes it best: these markets are conversations. There are those who just can’t seem to express their thoughts and ideas on paper (digital or otherwise) and a verbal conversation becomes the key essence to striking a deal.

People will not even search the net to find out how much will it cost to call you long distance. The second best approach to a conversation is to call the person in his (or her) country of origin. The best is to establish a local telephone number in that country. As I mentioned above, I use Skype to lease a New York area code telephone number (called Skype Online Number). You can get metered charging from Skype for every call you make or every call made to you, or get an unlimited call package – that’s up to you and the volume of calls you might be doing. If I use my Skype to call a US number, my New York number becomes my caller ID, which is now an easy way for anyone to call me back. This scenario is a one-is-to-one means of using the “cloud” to create conversations to develop a business relationship.

But how about your business that needs a calling platform for your entire office, not necessarily called a call center, but a VOIP-based PBX system that’s also cloud-based and can be leased on a monthly basis? Easier said and easier done. Cloud-based customer contact solutions such as Kunnect have been giving both contact centers and non-call center companies – vertical markets as they are often called – the ability to manage incoming and outgoing calls from anywhere in the world – with the ease and convenience of the web. From intelligent routing of calls, interactive voice responses and auto-attendants, fully recording all calls, monitoring everything from the ease of a notebook while sipping Mai Tais on the beach, providing other cloud-based solutions that help manage your workforce to become better productive – the list goes on and on. So, instead of buying hardware and software that need years of return (on investment) for a business that caters to seasonal sales, marketing, service and support campaigns, it’s best to start with a leasing solution, a pure operational expense answer to your customer contact needs.

The point of all these is your ability to make it very easy for your customer, prospect or existing, to start having a conversation with you. Then, you need to make it very easy for your customer to continue the business relationship. The end of it all is to make it very easy for your customer to earn or gain from all these. The key to succeeding is to engage the conversation all throughout. So, stop those useless messaging; not everyone can write and express themselves in words like you – let them talk to you. “Talk is Cheap!” has been my battle cry slogan since I started using the cloud as a means to create conversations globally. Nothing that generates profit is free; you have to spend a little to earn a little, or more.

“The internet is all about conversations” and to begin the conversation means allowing your target market to have that one-click-fits-all method of calling you anytime, in his own sweet time, and his waking hours, not yours. Create the conversation immediately, not just for you but for your entire workforce, be they sales, marketing, finance, HR or a host of other work they do for your business, department or group. Because if you continue to dabble on pure messaging, someone else will already be talking to your customers. Don’t miss out on it.

Photo by forexsoftware at Flickr.com

NOTE: This blog also appears at the inContact Blog.

Is 2011 the year where US companies realize its failures in outsourcing call center operations to offshore sites? A TheStreet article announcing Delta’s (airlines) plan to shut down its call center in Montago Bay, Jamaica, is just one of the bad news circling around. In 2009, Delta also closed a reservations call center in India, stating that “customer acceptance” of outsourced, offshore call centers are low. In addition, TheStreet also reported that US Airways will close a passenger call center in the Philippines later this year.

Many companies in the developed world joined the fray of outsourcing parts of their operations to Third World countries like India and the Philippines primarily because of cheap labor, much as decades-ago manufacturing firms have done so. However, this often results in low quality of workmanship because there is not a lot of thought placed with this “blatant outsourcing” before moving parts of a company’s operations abroad. Boardroom decisions usually only look at the pennies saved without much thought placed in operational challenges to make it work. Hence, failures result in bad press and publicity for both the outsourced country and the US industry that the corporation esteems itself to be part of.

Correct use of technology, hiring the right people and establishing optimal processes are the three basic rules for successfully outsourcing a company’s operations elsewhere. Though a premise-based solution is often implemented, the problem with this model lies in dealing with several points of command, control and information between all parties involved – end users, software vendors, telecommunications providers, and managed networks, to name a few. Thus, a solution where every point of contact uses the cloud is something a business must start taking advantage of. Therein lies cloud-based providers like Kunnect, a perfect conduit for outsourcing because not only does it provide the best-in-class SaaS call center technology and employs hundreds of people with decades of expertise in the industry, it also has access to thousands of seats with hundreds of its clients, many of which are outsourcers within the United States and in countries like the Philippines. This immediate access to technology, people and process from one entity gives businesses the optimal leverage to move operations outside its location but correctly manage and monitor it using the cloud and employing tried-and-tested resources that  they can deliver. With its overseas offices in APAC and EMEA (Asia and Europe), US businesses can now rely on the perfect SaaS technology, the best expert advise to create workable processes, and access to thousands of qualified and skilled human resources from its 750+ clients at favorable rates.

Call Center Outsourcing 2.0 defines a new way to help US businesses face its challenges of fiscal growth by leveraging the best, hassle-free, single point of outsourcing contract for SaaS-based call center technology, people and process. In this all-in-one model, it’s apparent that these providers stick out to be best, ready-to-deliver service provider in the call center space.

Today’s times call for more creative ways of marketing your business, whether you’re direct selling for a conglomerate or running your own small business. People nowadays mention Facebook and Twitter as if it were already part of the dictionary. To wit, ever notice that writing the word “Facebook” in your Facebook wall-post results in a red-underlined, misspelled word? Yes, totally “Duh?”

But, as a small business owner, how do you market your product or service today? What medium should you use to generate the most of “value for money?” What’s better – online or offline marketing? Let me write my discourse in small business marketing through a series of questions that have been asked by many small business owners and their peers. Before I start, let me also offer my disclaimer: “Please note I am not a famous author of marketing books nor am I a coveted marketing guru consulting for industrial giants. Like you, I am a small business owner who has street-smart knowledge of marketing a business with a few books read on the subject matter.” Just making sure you know where I’m coming from.

Where Do I Begin?

Let it be known that I began my story with the theme song from a classic, all-time favorite movie. LOL! Continue the lyrics to the song for the next four words and you’ll get the hint of what I’m about to explain as one of the most vital component to marketing your small business.

Besides the fancy business plan and long-thought strategies, first things are always first: you’ve got to draw and describe the person that buys your product or service. Creating a generic description of your market that you guess will purchase it is not the best way, even if you’ve read 1,500-page text books about guerilla marketing and the like. You have to describe a very specific person, not a community of people. The moment you’ve consumed everything from your brain (and that of others) to describe this person, immerse this person into your business vision, mission, values and goals, and see if it fits. If not, you’ve got to rehash things with your sales, marketing, service, support and overall customer strategies to fit this person into everything that you do for your product, service and company.

I remember consulting for Planet Philippines, an entertainment and lifestyle, tabloid-sized newspaper that’s circulated to migrant and overseas Filipinos in 10 countries once-to-twice per month, for free (it derives revenue purely from advertising.) Planet Philippines is not a single corporate entity that prints and exports newspapers; rather, it is a franchised business where the owner of the brand provides content to its global franchisees, the latter of which locally prints and distributes the finished product within its community or city. Continuing on, I ventured to describe for Planet Philippines who exactly the reader of the newsmagazine is and came up with “Maria.”

Being female, Maria is 32 years old, married with two young children, ages 10 and 12, respectively, and living in the United States, specifically the city of Fontana in California. Both Maria and her husband are regular employees of their specific profession – Maria is a retail clerk at Walmart and her husband works as an X-ray technician at Kaiser Permanente. The daily work schedules of Maria and her husband is always different from each other so that one can bring the kids to school and the other one picks them up – Maria’s husband takes the early morning shift, ending at 3:00 PM, while she take the late shift, starting at 11:00 AM and ending at 7:00 PM. Maria and her family migrated to the U.S. when her kids were still very young, and they have been living in the U.S. for the past seven years.

Through the years, they’ve assimilated the culture of their new community but remained to have the heart of a Filipina and that of a Filipino family. They continued to speak in Pilipino (or Tagalog) in their rented house with their kids understanding what they’re saying but having difficulty uttering complete sentences. They met other Filipinos through their church and kids’ school, and expanded their network of other Filipino-American families as the years went by. Maria, typical of the Filipino mother, has always been busy multitasking for her family, from doing groceries to attending to the medical needs of her family and even making their weekend and vacation plans. The husband takes care of their cars, repairs of the house, and other “manly tasks” as Maria often quips.

Maria knows when Planet Philippines is available at the nearest mall and picking up a copy is part of her twice-a-month routine. She actually gets two copies and gives the other to her neighbor and best friend, also a Filipina-American but who never gets chance to grab a copy because of her off-hours work schedule as a nurse. Maria loves to read a printed copy rather than go to the internet, surf and read. For Maria, the internet is usually just for e-mail messaging with her relatives and friends in the Philippines, and for Facebook updates. She also subscribes to TFC only because of Wowowee (and that’s another story now that Willie is doing it in another channel). Maria and her husband can only afford to visit the Philippines every four years or so; with the other summer breaks her kids have, they try to tour some of the cities in the U.S. where they have relatives and can get free lodging from them.

Maria’s social conversations with other Filipino-American spouses are always about celebrity news and major events in the Philippines. Community news comes second, American entertainment news next in line, while sports and politics, regardless of country, always fall last. However, her husband loves to keep tabs of Philippine sports news and events, especially his school and college sports accolades, and Planet Philippines makes sure there an item or two about sports and politics in its content.

I can go on forever in describing Maria as the ideal customer of Planet Philippines but I won’t. The point is, this detailed description of Maria makes sure the newsmagazine’s content is focused on Maria and her family’s information needs; also, all the succeeding marketing efforts are always geared towards that description. Anyone reading the newsmagazine other than Maria is gravy. If there is a story that doesn’t really conform to Maria’s personality or her family but is interestingly popular, Planet Philippines makes its earnest decision to print it or not. If the newsmagazine has a new applicant for a franchised publisher, it evaluates the applicant’s city and its population, and interviews him on the merit of his intent why he would like to distribute Planet Philippines in his community. Everything that Planet Philippines does, it does so on the merit of Maria’s needs. In five years or so, it will have to decide whether to recreate Maria as the same 32-year old migrant Filipina-American or continue on with Maria’s life; or create a new newsmagazine for another Maria while continuing on with old Maria as she ages.

It is inevitable that you create the ideal buyer of your product or service and hone your efforts to effectively market and sell your product or service to this specific buyer. It is not the other way around. In my case, I market and sell a hosted call center solution in the Philippines from Kunnect.com. I don’t attend conferences and events where the big players of my industry go to because they are not my ideal Maria. I know very well that Kunnect in the Philippines is more relevant and meaningful to the small business call center – my Maria – the less-than-100-seats of voice-based outsourced call center companies. Paying large sums of money just to attract the big players will never be Kunnect’s cup of tea; just gravy. But I still touch base with the big call center companies through direct yet informal means only because they are still the pillars of my chosen industry; however, dreaming of many big, closed sales coming from this “large business” market is, well, a dream. Kunnect can’t deliver complex after-sale services that large enterprises require of an expensive purchase (i.e. 24×7 onsite support). It can, however, deliver simple, 24×7 “remote” after-sale services, much like many of the SaaS-oriented (software-as-a-service) and cloud computing providers out there. Though I am the official in-country sales and marketing rep of Kunnect, I can’t be all over the country physically presenting Kunnect to every prospect while managing a cadre of support engineers that can be whisked to a client’s site in less than an hour. Again, that’s too expensive to do. That’s why I developed my own simple website to be able to present Kunnect directly to my Maria in the Philippines (and Asia), the small business call center, without onsite intervention. The phone and the web are my best friends. I provide the “product + service” combination to my Maria at dirt-cheap, affordable rates but with a stable, simple-to-use product that doesn’t need too much client hand-holding during its set up and implementation, and has a good help desk system that’s remote, not onsite.

I also think of my alma mater, Avon. Direct selling for Avon means thousands of people starting out as independent, non-salaried dealers during the time they do not have much cash, and ending up to become successful millionaires. Avon sells its products through its network of dealers and distributors, not by way of retail malls and superstores. Though they attempted retail in the early nineties, it wasn’t a successful endeavor and they knew it wouldn’t be. The retail attempt was (and still is) a way to glamorize their products, not really make tons of money selling it there. Its marketing and advertising strategies may look affluent but that is its intention, being an “aspiration” than being direct to the market. That kind of marketing helps their dealer-network push their products to the latter’s customers beyond their social class and helps create more buyers. From Tweety de Leon to Lea Salonga and Angel Locsin, the celebrity-laden endorsers are all aspirational users of the Avon products that reflects what the customers of their direct selling network is. But inside the Avon company in the Philippines is a huge sales support structure very much knowledgeable of its direct selling network – what it wants and what it needs.

Do I Develop a Brand or a Product?

“Isn’t a product a brand?” Well, the soothsayers and naysayers will all have their book-length descriptions of product and brand, and both groups are still correct in their own thesis. However, for the non-advertising geeks of the world like us, product (or service) is the thing we manufacture and perfect while brand is the label we put in the product. Nike built a product first before it became a brand; Coca-cola did the same. Almost every large, successful entity today with a global brand started out perfecting a great product. Even Microsoft, at one point in their product-oriented life, built then marketed a stable MS-DOS operating system (the granddaddy of today’s Windows 7) long before it started its pooh-pooh “market then build” business way or so fashionably called “vaporware” – software that were not yet finished but were already being marketed as if it already existed.

Everyone wants to be popular but immediate popularity for a small business means lots of cash to gamble. Instead, as a small business owner, you should develop and perfect your product while marketing it directly to your Maria. Geographically, isn’t it more cost-effective to find Maria within your community or city before you attempt to go outside of it? I remember a few small business entities I joined that over-reached the limits of their marketing efforts to far flung places of outside the scope of service convenience – totally wasted money. For the few that were open-minded, we got back to basics and told ourselves, “Hey! We should first be the best supplier at our own community before we even trek outside it.” If you hold office in Manila, you should first saturate and own the City of Manila, so to speak, before you start spending valuable money marketing outside it.

One of the best examples of a large company in the Philippines that does this is BayanTel. You can easily subscribe to BayanTel’s internet plans within Quezon City and get better internet connection than getting it from their competitors. In fact, they can install your E1 line (a full 2Mbps bandwidth usually subscribed by multiple user companies) within 3 days, way faster than their nearest competitor’s timeline of 30 days. Go outside Quezon City and internet connection with BayanTel’s competitors (probably) becomes better, say Globe within the Makati CBD. The point is even if BayanTel doesn’t taunt the idea, they know they provide the best product with the fastest service within Quezon City.

Here’s a bit of trivia before I end this section. Did you know that Phil Knight, founder of Nike, and his merry band of offbeat co-founders used to buy and sell the Tiger brand of rubber shoes in the United States, exclusively manufactured by Onitsuka of Japan? They only sold rubber shoes solely for track and field sport and its (then) new lifestyle equivalent, jogging. Eventually, they came up with the Nike brand and Swoosh logo but still relied on Japanese technology to produce their new branded rubber shoes, still only for track and field, and jogging. Maria, to them and then, was a track and field, and jogging enthusiast! The rest, as they say, is history.

Do I Market Online or Offline?

I’m going to assume you’ve got your product and service strategies perfected to a tee with the perfect description of your Maria, and you have all the internal processes needed to continue to enhance your “product + service” combination all through the life of your corporate entity. If you are dependent on someone else to manufacture and service the product you are selling, let’s assume they are doing the same thing with their product that you’re reselling. If not, better look for another product, lest you fail because despite your creative marketing prowess, your product still, well, “sucks.”

Many online soothsayers of the small business industry say that being on the web puts you at level with the large enterprises – everyone has the same footing in terms of marketing messages and graphics. But despite that, it still boils down to how conveniently accessible is your product to Maria. Can Maria call, order and have it delivered within the hour? Can Maria find it in her favorite mall? Can Maria surf the internet, find your website, and buy online? Online marketing may be the cheapest way to market your product but beware of cheap activities – they also tend to deliver cheap results. Think about the online matchmaking sites. If it’s free, you get lots of obtrusive flack; if you have to pay, you get nearer to the right partner you’re looking for. The more you pay, the better the kind of person you’re matched to. I know of a friend who found the love of her life at Match.com and, after a year of courtship, have recently married each other, not for money, but for real love. The thing is, they both paid for the service.

Let’s talk about the world. If Maria is a person who lives outside the Philippines (or your country for that matter), marketing your product in the World Wide Web will be more cost-effective than having to go through tri-media means (published media, television and radio) in foreign soil. But also consider the limitations of internet marketing and social media networking and marketing. Single-digit-percentage results from the numerous online “hits” you have is something common when you advertise with Facebook or Google. (An exception is being geographically located in a First World country like the United States.) Online advertising is not a one-time deal; there is a learning process you have to develop, especially the first time you use it, and you have to tweak your ad copy until you develop more prospects out of the hits. For example, when your Facebook ad is clicked, will you get better results when your prospect goes to your website, blog or Facebook Fan Page? Again, personify Maria and see how she reacts to either three. But then, social media marketing is not a one-time thing – it’s an ongoing, daily activity planned out in the beginning and adjusted through the period of execution. There is no start-and-stop activity to social media marketing, not unlike telephone marketing campaigns that run for a month or so then you evaluate and proceed with next-steps activities. Social media marketing also has its business partner – social media networking, a daily, continuous activity done not only by a few of your marketing reps but your entire organization, even your lowly accounting clerk.

If your product is for local consumption, say the Philippines, rethink your online marketing strategy. Though internet penetration in the household has gone up over the years, still, many people access the internet in their workplace or the internet cafés. The affordability of buying and leasing an internet system for the home – computer plus ISP connection – still rests in the middle-to-upper class of the country’s social spectrum. Even if there are about 18 million Filipino users in Facebook, overall activity is still not that high compared to First World subscribers. Traditional media, mobile text-messaging and the telephone are still the popular means of prospecting in the Philippines. Even if you consider the social class of Maria, you will eventually need to conduct a combination of offline and online marketing for your product – you will still need to bridge the gap between the traditional and social media.

For online marketing, there is web marketing and there is social media marketing. Web marketing simply takes your corporate or product-oriented website to the mainstream of the World Wide Web while you devour search engines and news sites for footprint presence, paid or otherwise. This is where SEO activities (search engine optimization) comes into the picture, a pursuit that’s not a one-time endeavor but altogether an ongoing web activity of competitive comparisons and website tweaking. If your product is more global than local, then the effort to conduct yourself in the web becomes bigger. For local presence, the smaller the type of market, the smaller your effort for web marketing becomes. A sari-sari store (a home-based, very small, over-the-counter retail store by the street in the Philippines) is simply an offline market than online. A door-to-door delivery of your product is more open to online marketing.

Social media marketing, on the other hand, becomes more content and conversation driven than web marketing, though sometimes web and social media marketing overlap especially in a pure online business venture. You connect, network and socialize with your chosen web networking sites, like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, in the guise of marketing your product. In my humble experience doing the above, I’ve concluded that many of my prospects were not my friends in these social media websites I actively participate. It is the network of friends and acquaintances of my friends, sometimes leaping two hops or more that become my Maria. This meant I should market my product to my friends in Facebook or the like in a very subtle way than being face-to-face direct.

But which social media website do each of us choose to use to effectively market our product to our Maria? Let’s take my chosen industry as an example – the almost half-a-million call center workforce in the country. Their online presence began with the height of Friendster as a popular social media for the young and yuppies-at-heart (I had to use that term to include myself – LOL!) If you think Facebook is their primary means of social media activity today, think again. Mom and Dad actually invaded Facebook earlier than they did, or the parents were more active than the kids. Also, many Friendster-savvy call center agents still cling on to their first social media love simply because it’s too darn difficult and time-consuming (or totally blind as a bat) to transfer their photos and profile, and begin anew with links, testimonials and a host of other features that Facebook may have. For Maria being a call center agent in the Philippines, if I had to choose just one social media website to market my product that’s most appealing to call center agents in the country, I’d prefer Friendster over Facebook. It’s not about the popularity of the social media website – it’s where Maria actually spends more time.

If Maria likes to read interesting content in the web or at social media sites, then “interesting” also has to be “meaningful” and “relevant” to her lifestyle, be it work or personal. You can’t push your product to the face of Maria – she’ll eventually snub you on day-one. Rather, write or blog the generic equivalent of your product while placing it at the sidelines of your blog. I call this MGB – Marketing in the Guise of a Blog (okay, so I invented the acronym – we all do it all the time.) The same goes for Facebook; rather than label your Fan Page “The Best All-in-one Glorious Toothbrush,” name it as “My Toothbrush, My Teeth” or anything that describes it as a special interest group who adorns their teeth and the toothbrush that most appeals to them than a bunch of people who will (future tense) love to use your new yet publicly unknown “Glorious Toothbrush” product. The more generic the phrase or title, the bigger the possibility of people joining your Facebook Fan Page without even directly marketing the existence of your page to them. But remember the time your Maria has with the internet – it’s not as if she’ll be online all day long. Go back to how you described the personality of your Maria down to her daily schedule of activities in life. That schedule becomes your embedded routine when you interact you’re your Maria.

In the End, a Conversation Still Wins Over Messaging

My personal website – this blog – is plastered with the word “conversations” between the title, sub-title and most of my posts. That’s because I am a strong believer that no matter how the internet was invented and is used today, the winning formula for online success will always be the site that provides a more convenient means of developing real conversations with its community of visitors, loyal readers or members.

If you Tweet something, be prepared to respond back to every direct message (called “DM”), especially a simple “thanks” for re-Tweeting (labeled “RT”) your Tweet. If someone comments on your Facebook post, comment back all the time. In Facebook, you’ll notice that the more comments you have, the bigger the chance of that post appearing in the “Top News” stream of your member’s wall, the default wall when one opens his or her Facebook for the first time. The same goes for Friendster testimonials, LinkedIn comments, Plaxo replies and a host of many other social media websites. The conversation you create with a single person becomes more meaningful and relevant to him because he knows that the next time he comments, he expects a reply from you. People are still people even with their online self. When they say something to someone like you, it means well for them to receive a reply.

But why stop at just writing messages, comments and replies? If you can create a face-to-face conversation, won’t you grab that opportunity? Last year, I experimented upon messaging and responding to those who commented on my posts at LinkedIn by asking fifteen minutes of their time to meet me at the Starbucks nearest to their workplace. Half responded positively, and then half of these I actually met for coffee (see my story why I chose Starbucks as the best venue for meeting). I usually offered a my service to them, to find out if I could re-market their product for free on my blog or become an independent reseller paid only by commission when I close a sale (or as an affiliate marketer.) During the face-to-face conversation, I of course introduced what I was doing as a freelance entrepreneur, including a show-and-tell of my product.

Many of these fifteen minute conversations turned out to be half- or one-hour discussions. I included a “who am I” story-telling section so that my new acquaintance gets to know me better, expanding from the web profile they read. I made sure I presented only one core competence, say networking marketing, and one product, like Kunnect, the hosted call center solution I’ve been marketing in the country, that I valued more than the others. Choosing one or two competences and products made it easier for them to remember me; presenting a mother load of capabilities will make them forget me – “what the heck does he do again?” Quaint chances of messaging each other in the social media websites after that meeting made them good referrers and reference people to their own network – they always knew what I was all about. Even my high school batch mates relate my name to the term “call center”; when in need of advise regarding the industry, “talk to Raffy Pekson.” Awesome!

Your online conversations, multiple instances of comments and replies on several topics, have to be transformed to a face-to-face meeting. Only then will your social media acquaintance be transformed into a real transaction. Marketing’s overall goal is to generate sales. Marketing without the intent of a sale is an expensive hobby and not reality. Somewhere along the way, there is always an opportunity to monetize what you market.

If my social media acquaintance is not in the country, I call them up. I balance the cost to call overseas versus the benefits I derive from it, be it a short-term advantage or a long-term gain. For example, I’ve had an online acquaintance that started back in 2002 when the term “social media” didn’t even exist and kept my using my BMW (another acronym? Click here to find out what BMW means) to make sure I was abreast at what we were both doing in life. I kept in touch with him at least twice each year. In 2006, I e-mailed him to introduce what I was doing – setting up an 80-seat call center in the Philippines. Lo and behold, that e-mail message turned into a telephone conversation which led me to get Reed Business Information (or RBI), the largest trade publication company in the United States, as my most prestigious client for the call center. As it turned out, the VP for Operations of RBI was his good friend. Whodathunk? Yes, who would think that a casual acquaintance through the web and very rare telephone conversations turned out to be a huge transaction four years later.

Turn your social media conversations into real, face-to-face or verbal conversations. Gut feelings and intuitions always come in to play when two people are talking to each other, and those factors tremendously add to the emergence of a viable transaction – the introduction of your Maria to you by your acquaintance. Whether it does or not, that person will be glad to have talked to you directly and, in earnest, he or she will keep you in mind when an opportunity for your product falls on his lap or even just passes him by. The personal and professional “you” always do mix all the time, even way back before the advent of social media networking and marketing. Even your primary education classmates may now be primed up to be your customers, or their friends, thereof, only if you kept in touch with them and they know what you do.

Thank goodness for Tim Berners-Lee, Steve Wozniak, Mark Andreseen, Jerry Yang, eGroups.com, Plaxo, Ryze.com and a host of others who became first in their fields so that we now have MacBooks, FireFox, Google, Yahoo! Groups, Facebook and LinkedIn in the internet and the World Wide Web.

In the continuing legacy of the internet, it is and will always be about conversations. The better conversation is verbal. The best is face-to-face.

Photo of WorldLink88 call center I managed

Many people have asked me for advise on setting up and operating a small business call center. That’s been my niche – always the small business advocate even with call centers. The industry has many descriptions of how many seats a small call center has to have. In my personal opinion based on experience, small means no greater than 100 seats. It’s a number that’s easy to manage even by yourself. Beyond that, I call it mid-sized all the way up to 999 seats where you now start setting up a more formal management team.

From the various informal Q&A sessions I’ve conducted over the past years, I decided to write down some of them in short snippets as my young and agile mind could recall.

Q: How much does it take to set up a call center?

This is always the first question asked when I’m with a group of entrepreneurs interested in operating a call center. There are two ways of setting up a small business call center: (1) buy, build and operate, and (2) lease everything and operate. The major difference is the amount of money you need to shell out. It’s like buying a house to live in and furnishing it with the fixtures you like; or renting one fully-furnished and making-do with what you have. So, if you have the cash to stay in business for more than year despite the usual income cycles of a startup business, then go for the “build and operate” model; this way, you spread your ROI which doesn’t force you to generate a high revenue. However, if you are not 100 percent sure of being in business for more than year, lease as much as everything you can. You can plan to move out in a year’s time to your newly built call center after accumulating enough cash from your income.

The frugal set up cost is about $1,500 per seat (or workstation), inclusive of every machine, furniture, fixture, painting, construction, etc. It costs more if you decide to use expensive but aesthetically good-looking materials. For leasing, expect to spend about $200 per seat, per month, but this not only includes everything you need to set up a seat but also operating expenses like rent and all utilities.

Q: How many seats should I set up or begin with?

Many people think that starting small and building or getting more seats later on is the ideal way to operate a call center. In fact, the magic number I’ve heard is five seats. This is actually unproductive and may pin down your hopes of growing in the long run. Many foreign clients want to outsource part of their business operations with no less than 10 seats. If you only had 5 or 10 seats, how would you determine if a new, prospective client’s program or campaign is better than the one you’re currently running? However, if you had 20 seats and was looking into a new campaign that required an initial requirement of 10 seats, you could test the new campaign with, say, 3 or 5 seats for a few days or a week to see if it fits the skill-set of your workforce and your revenue projections; and you can do this without any major effect on your existing client’s campaign. After a week, if the new campaign proves to be a whole lot better than the existing one, you’ve got a great problem: which do you choose? That scenario differs a lot if you only had 5 seats. With that little, it won’t make you grow – you might just get stuck where you are because you have no room to test and in effect grow your income stream to build or lease more seats.

The other opportunity when having the capacity to add more seats that in about 2 or 3 years time you’ve accumulated hundreds of seats performing beautifully, there’s a bigger chance for a foreign player to buy you out at a substantial amount. Many mid-sized call centers have been bought out in the past not only because of the operating size but the skill-set of the workforce and the types of campaigns and clients you maintain fit well into the foreign buyer’s business model.

Q: What kind of program or campaign should I get?

Most small business call centers run performance-based telemarketing campaigns. Though people always think that fixed-income, inbound-oriented campaigns like customer service and technical support are better, the reality is you have a better chance of making more money in performance-based campaigns. What people don’t realize is that inbound-oriented campaigns have more metrics that the call center must achieve; if you don’t hit your client’s metrics, you actually don’t get paid for those failures. Therefore, inbound-oriented campaigns are also performance-based. The major difference with inbound-orietned campaigns is you don’t get more money if you do better than the metrics. For telemarketing-oriented campaigns, the more you perform (i.e. selling a product), the more you earn. Whether the campaigns are easy lead generation or a full cycle, cold-calling up to closing the sale type, managing a call center that’s running sales-oriented campaigns is akin to operating a direct selling agency or group – it’s fun, involves lots of cheerleading and sales activities, employee tenure is based on pure numbers (no subjective evaluations required), and so on. And ordinary business-people and entrepreneurs understand selling a whole lot better than the intracies of inbound campaigns (what the heck is an AHT?)

Q: Where do I get campaigns?

One of your roles as a small business call center owner, delegated or done by yourself, is to keep looking for campaigns even if you’re happy running the current one – on a daily basis. Call center clients and campaigns come and go, much like any kind of business client who will favor you today but not for eternity. You have to be ready for that inevitable time when your client suddenly bolts out for varying good or bad reasons. So, business development is an ongoing, 54-week job for you; and the internet is aswarm with brokers and direct clients always looking for the right call centers to run their campaigns. A huge number of them cater to the outbound-base, sales-oriented campaigns.

When you find a prospect in the internet, establish the initial e-mail correspondence but find a way to talk to each other. Don’t e-mail each other to death. Verbal communication is always a great way of getting your gut to tell you “This is great!” or “Something’s wrong here.” You can find prospective clients and brokers in social networks like LinkedIn and its many industry-related groups, Yahoo! Groups, Google-ing specific clients and making the pitch, and so on. Like a good salesperson, ask your happy clients if they can refer you to their peers without sounding like it’s going to affect your current business relationship with them. Also market the past campaign experiences of your workforce even if they’re newly hired – these kinds of information give you tremendous weight in the type of campaigns you can get your hands on. For past and current clients, ask their permission to post their company names, logos and short testimonials on your website (yes, you definitely need one.) Alliances such as technology providers are also a good public relations items to post in your website, i.e. Dell for your computers, Cisco for your network, Microsoft for your O/S, etc. Whatever it takes to build credibility as immediate as possible for your startup call center.

Q: How do I recruit good people for my startup call center?

The fastest way to recruit is by advertising in the dailies but that’s way too expensive to do for a small business call center. Online job boards like Jobstreet.com and JobsDB.com provide less expensive ways (the last I paid for Jobstreet.com’s service was 5,000 Pesos per position). However, one online place I go to to recruit experienced agents, team leaders and supervisors is Friendster.com, not Facebook.com. Friendster.com allows me to search specific call center companies written in user profiles and message each of these people invidivually using Friendster.com’s messaging system. However, before you attempt to do this, make sure you complete your Friendster.com profile as expansive and detailed as possible because your recruits will first look at your Friendster.com profile before they answer you back. Don’t recruit blindly – place your full name, company name, full addrress, landline and mobile phone numbers, and e-mail address (for the latter, get a company domain name – only costs $11/year at GoDaddy.com and getting GMail to host your @domain.com e-mail account is free). There are hardly any agent in LinkedIn.com and way too many managers and expats who you don’t need for a small business call center. Facebook.com isn’t recruitment-friendly. Some Yahoo! Groups where call center agents congregate can also help you recruit good people.

Q: How much should I pay my new recruits?

I’ve managed telemarketing-oriented call centers and here’s my commonsense answer to this question. For me, the reason I pay someone a basic salary is for that person to hit his or her quota or functional objectives. Anything beyond that is commissionable, so to say. Now, remember that the Filipino culture has always been employee-oriented and fixed-income salary-based. So, the higher the basic pay, the more enticing you are to them. Match your breakeven levels and margins to the basic pay of your workforce. For example, if a basic pay of 13,000 Pesos equates to $30 per day, per seat, a breakeven level that includes everything from leases and amortization, up to the salaries of your supervisors and manager, add no less than 50% margin or $45 per day, per seat, that’s not bad considering that many telemarketing campaigns pay a lot more commissions than $45 on a per sale basis of their products and services. Your agents might think P 13,000 is low but the amount of sales they need to generate is also pretty low. Then, incentivize their pay with commissions beyond their quota. I usually reserve no less than 25% of margins above my $45 mark for workforce commissions; giving more becomes enticing for them. If you can show them exactly what you’re talking about on paper during the final interview of your selected few, I’m pretty sure you’ll be a great call center to work with. The bottom-line is not to be greedy and your workforce will reward you for doing so.

Now, if your call center is in the boondocks far away from the nearest 711 convenience store and accessible public transportation, you have to increase your basic pay to entice experienced people to come join you despite the location. To arrive at how much should higher pay be, go back to the equation above and determine your breakeven level, margins and the rest of the projections.

Q: Should I set up beside existing call centers or somewhere where I am the only call center in that area?

There are two things you need to consider when choosing your location: (1) available internet bandwidth, and (2) access to experienced people. For the second part, I think I’ve answered the solution to that if you are locating yourself away from major thoroughfares of public transportation (see “How much should I pay my new recruits?”) In addition, I made sure to write “experienced” because you will not have the time, money and patience to teach newbies how to sell. For the first consideration, you need to make sure that your internet service provider (ISP) in that area can bring you to the internet cloud in the smallest amount of hops as possible and in the most stable way it can. Try testing your ISP’s connectivity by using SpeedTest.net and connecting to a server in Los Angeles. If you have access to a VisualRoute software or a similar solution, the better for you to determine everything you need for your voice-oriented internet connectivity. Lastly, it’s inevitable that you provide the expected basic amenities of a call center office: unlimited hot and cold drinking water, microwave oven, a place to wash and store their eating utensils, clean restrooms, bright lighting, comfortable workstations, and a host of many minor things that make a difference.

So, location is dependent on internet access and access to experienced employees. Everything else is replaceable with something similar.

Q: What kind of technology should I get?

Technology here means the kind of tools your workforce will be using when calling or receiving calls. It is what makes your entire call center productive or otherwise. It only means that besides the skills of your workforce and the nice campaigns you’re able to get, technology is the third important piece of the trilogy of major factors that will make or break your small business call center.

Here’s where I become biased. I’ve experienced hands-on installation, implementation and operation of enterprise call center solutions, those that physically resides inside your call center network (also called “premise-based),” and I’ve used hosted call center solutions or technologies that are not residing inside your network but are accessible through the web. For a startup small business call center, I recommend going for the hosted solution because it is subscription-based – you lease the service rather than having to buy the software (which is usually expensive) and the required server-hardware (also expensive) plus the telecommunications costs of calling landline and mobile phones in the country to which you are subcontracted to call. As you work your way up to the comfort level of the day-to-day grind of call center operations, you begin to realize what it takes to make it successful and falling in love with what you do – or not. Leasing is an easy get-away solution just in case your call center operations withers away due to many reasons. Buying software and hardware is like buying a car – only after a few months, the purchase price depreciates plus the next buyer has to acquire the same maintenance agreement with the software and hardware providers you bought them from without any discounts.

Between the few players I’ve encountered in the market like Five-9, Drishti, Touchstar and many others, I’ve found Kunnect to be the most cost-effective solution that gives me about 80% to 90% of what I want (and need). Kunnect is also very user-friendly, meaning I didn’t have to hire expensive IT experts or engineers to manage it (like VicciDial and other Linux-based systems which are usually free but takes several IT people to manage it; and you can’t afford these people to be late or absent – so, you hire more as idle backup). It takes a 3-hour remote training session to learn administration and 5-minutes for the agents to understand it. With Kunnect, I was able to hire home-based Quality Assurance (QA) analysts; that’s less seats to pay for. I didn’t need a report analyst to generate half-day, end-of-day, end-of-week (and so on) reports I’m required to submit to my clients. Because Kunnect was simple to use, I sat down with my team leaders and supervisors for an hour and taught them how to manage the dialer and create the Excel-based client reports on a daily basis. If I was sick at home or vacationing in Boracay, all I need is internet access to monitor the call center, because it’s web-based. I can go on and on – the point is, it fit my bill. After 3 years of using it, Kunnect offered me to represent them in the Philippines and Asia. I accepted only because I knew how effective it was for a small business call center, I knew how to use it (even knew the shortcuts on an operational standpoint) and I just loved their solution. So, there – that’s why I wrote “Here’s where I become biased.”

If you have any further questions related to this post, please go to my Contact Page to write down your thoughts and I will try to answer it as soon as I can.

Photo by kitoy at Flickr.com

With the proclamation of the next President of the Republic of the Philippines still a month or less away, it’s time to take a look at the campaign pronouncements of Benigno “Noynoy” S. Aquino III as it affects the industry that has continued to provide a constant stream of Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) and immediate jobs to our young employees – the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), specifically the Call Center segment.

Here is an excerpt from Noynoy’s official webpage, Noynoy.ph:

“My central concern is the welfare of my people. They need jobs. Our manufacturing industry has withered away. The toothpaste and shampoo we use is even imported from Thailand!”

“So what are our options? BPO and tourism are critical growth areas. Take a look at Leyte and Samar. The hotels aren’t as good as they should be and the infrastructure is poor.”

Though no details have been yet specified, Noynoy clearly identified the BPO industry as a key business sector which his future administration will be looking into as a continuing source of jobs.

Noynoy also added some intended policy plans, as reported by ABS-CBN, when he is elected as President.

“Streamline fiscal incentives offered to investors, such as tax holidays, to bring in more revenues.”

Clearly, this is a good plan to pursue to increase the influx of FDIs into the country thus channeling more jobs including and besides call center jobs. However, there is disconnect on the skills and competencies of our human resources to the types of investors Noynoy plans to woo. Also, Noynoy should include Filipino entrepreneurs in these incentives to give them a chance to compete with its foreign counterparts. Include migrant Filipinos (those who are residents of other countries) who may opt to set up a call center than invest on uninhabited condominiums and the like.

A headache that many foreign companies shrug as a “common business practice” in the country is bureaucracy and red tape. Noynoy states in the ABS-CBN report,

“Reduce red tape and simplify procedures in doing business.”

Though many of the national government agencies have been offering faster processing and web-based services, there are still a lot of improvements to be made to eliminate red tape and simplify government procedures as these affect local and foreign companies.

“Promote industries with the greatest potential for growth and where the Philippines has a competitive advantage, such as agribusiness, business process outsourcing, creative industries, infrastructure, manufacturing and logistics, socially responsible mining, and tourism and retirement.”

The BPO industry has proven itself to be a successful model for foreign investments and job creation. Though it partly falls into the many items of Noynoy’s “to do” list, I do hope he and his administration find ways to build upon its success and not just maintain the status quo. Regardless of the global recession that hit the United States and Europe, outsourcing continues to climb with other countries now vying for the same space as the Philippines started a decade ago.

“Form a group to review possible changes to economic provisions in the constitution.”

This is one of the most important legacies of Aquino’s mother during her term in office from 1986 to 1992 – Noynoy intends to replicate this in his first 100 days as president. On this matter, I think the organized groups representing the industry, particularly BPA/P (Business Processing Association of the Philippines) and the CCAP (Call Center Association of the Philippines) should spearhead the effort to create meaningful economic-oriented constitutional provisions that benefit the industry and the nation as a whole.

In a 2007 Inquirer interview, the interviewer espouses the observation that many college graduates have no choice but to work for the call centers that is outside the scope of what they studied and majored in. The interviewer asks Noynoy if he supports this kind of progression – graduates having no choice but to work as a call center agent. Noynoy responds,

“Well, at this point in time, when we have such a high unemployment rate, I don’t think we can really be choosy. Which indicates also, why with the mistakes we have, that we are not giving them any other opportunities.”

This makes Noynoy a realist regarding the magnitude of unemployment the country should have had if it were not for the job offers of the BPO industry, particularly the call center segment. National and local government units should begin to carry the banner of providing career growths and paths to everyone working inside the industry, including call center agents, on a more pragmatic means than just day-dreaming on (sometimes expensive) possibilities that doesn’t work. College graduates working in call centers are benefitted by developing the discipline of corporate life, obtaining the communications skills many lacked pre-BPO days, acquiring the tenacity of sales, marketing, service and support, learning the principles behind giving real service to a customer and understanding the opportunities to find themselves and their strengths while fixing their weaknesses. These are the inherent competencies worth mentioning that the industry builds on our college graduates and prepares them to embark on bigger things in their career.

“…so, there’s seems to be a discontinuity in our basic abilities; perhaps our education system, the value formation aspect, the opportunities, so that we can achieve the potentials, the fullest potentials of what is intrinsic in us.”

After the Marcos regime, the height of democracy led the country to disregard global standard and practices over assumed Filipino ideals, standards that once made the Philippines a business beacon of Asia in the 50′s, 60′s and the 70’s. However, who would have known that a good command of the English language would become a big requirement to a future industry that aided the country in alleviating its unemployment and fiscal requirements. Many colleges and universities, upon seeing the trend early on, began their own version of “English Only” policies and improved communication skills without the help of the local or national government. They already knew long before government came in to help that their future graduates had to be equipped with globally at-par skills so that at best they could easily enter the call center workforce if they couldn’t find work in their respective fields of expertise.

I hope the general policies that Noynoy laid out long before the 90-day electoral campaign period began will not change to the dictates of the people who supported him in effort and money. I encourage everyone in the BPO-call center industry to remind our upcoming President of his campaign promises to continue building and fostering the industry that gave life to the Philippines when it needed it most. I look forward to our industry pillars – BPA/P and CCAP – to assist our new President in proposing good changes in governance of the economic policies of government, both in law and in practice, so that these changes help the people working inside the industry and those that have always been supporting it since a decade ago.

I look forward that Noynoy personally gets involved in the BPO industry so that it can acquire more investments and create more jobs that warrant the creativity and personality of the Filipino people, that the masses can also join the ranks of the BPO corporate world, and that the public and private academic community is assisted in its continuing intent to provide its graduates the right skills regardless of industry.

With prayers, passion and commitment, this sunrise industry will continue to persuade foreign firms and local entrepreneurs to locate and invest in more centers in the country, provide more jobs and directly be involved in helping train and educate the masses to give them also a chance to work for this celebrated industry.

The CEO and COO of KUNNECT recently visited the Philippines to launch its call center technology solutions to the Philippine BPO market. Fred Cote, co-founder and CEO, spoke at the October 12 meeting of the members of the Call Center Association of the Philippines (CCAP) in Shangri-La Hotel Makati. Mr. Cote presented KUNNECT as a viable, inexpensive call center solution for immediate operations without the need for costly and time-consuming setup, calling it the “best in its class” of a full suite of call center features and functionality. Together with Mr. Cote were Chris Persaud, COO of KUNNECT, and Raffy Pekson II, the Country Representative of KUNNECT in the Philippines.

In Mr. Cote’s talk, he presented two new subscription plans, specially created for the Philippines, at half-the-price rates: Plan 100 for $100 per month, per seat, with unlimited calls within North America at a 1-year commitment contract, and Plan 125 for $125 per month, per seat, unlimited calls and a 6-month commitment contract. KUNNECT has two regular monthly plans with no commitment contract (start and stop anytime): the Basic Plan of $50 per month, per seat, plus toll charges, and the Unlimited Plan of $199 per month, per seat, with unlimited calls within North America. “Someone has yet to beat our $100 plan.  We are setting a new standard.” adds Mr. Cote of KUNNECT’S web-based SAAS call center offering.

During their two-week stay in the Philippines, Messieurs Cote and Persaud personally presented KUNNECT and met with the management teams of several call centers, and also non-call center companies that want to set up small, internally-controlled call centers for their sales, marketing, service and support business requirements. Mr. Pekson said that some prospective clients remarked that the main enticing feature of KUNNECT’S offer, besides the price, is one’s ability to start immediately without the high setup and maintenance costs.

KUNNECT is a global Tier-2 class telecommunications carrier with offices in the U.S., Canada, France and Germany, and does about 6 billion calls a year through its network, according to Mr. Cote.  “The amazing thing about the Philippine’s business and commercial broadband internet service is that all the telecommunications companies in the country first land their internet pop in One Wilshire, Los Angeles, which is where KUNNECT is co-located.   This helps eliminate any downtime due to latency problems, as well as ensure the shortest possible route to a business.” (Latency is defined as the round-trip time it takes to access an IP address or a website, measured in milliseconds).

Aside from its popular hosted call center solution, KUNNECT also sells a premise-based, enterprise version for call centers that want to host their own solution. For details about KUNNECT’S solutions, get in touch with Raffy Pekson, KUNNECT’S Country Representative in Manila, at 501-3025 and 0927-726-9949, or e-mail him at raffy@kunnect.com. You can also visit their website at www.kunnect.ph for more information.

Are call center training schools really producing candidates for the various small or large call center companies around the country with inadequate skills for promotion? Is the Philippines creating a population akin to factory workers of decades ago hype? Is the call center industry in the verge of imploding because of the increasing cost of training only entry level people, driving the cost of outsourcing in the Philippines higher?

My personal answer to all three questions is yes – many call center agents enter the corporate world without the right skills to succumb not only the graveyard shift but to tackle organizational ponderings. These entry-level employees are just like the thousands of factory workers of the past that did robotic tasks day in, day out. Today, the call center agents are like parrots, mimicking scripts rather than understanding their work and their role. In fact, many call center agents do not even finish college because call center companies started accepting undergraduates years back. Teens and the Yuppies would rather get a paycheck than finish their studies. That’s a sad realization today. At least before, factory workers worked without achieving a college degree simply because they couldn’t afford to pay tuition.

But, let me throw a question that may change the entire call center education landscape. What if there is a technology that could allow training schools more courses to teach besides just the usual lessons on becoming a good call center agent? What if this technology can give colleges and universities the chance to create a call center degree, exactly what the computer revolution of the 60’s and 70’s created multitudes of degrees in computer science starting in the 70’s and the 80’s.

Today, there aren’t enough retirees from the call center industry to provide a big pool of professors capable of teaching the entire process cycle of call center operations. A few managers have resigned because of burn out and you don’t want those kinds of people teaching kids a future career with angst and complains. I believe technology may provide a means to create new and better coursewares beyond the norm of just training a Filipino to be a call center agent. If the schools were given access to a good call center technology, then it can creatively position their students to become graduating professionals capable of providing skills and knowhow beyond the existing entry-level training system and allow call center companies to easily integrate these new human resources into their organizations without having to spend too much on organizational development, post-agent skills and a lot of coaching and mentoring –  just to explain what kind of career the agent can have.

Call center agents of the past

So, rather than stick with the norm and continue producing factory workers for the call center industry, why not start creating call center professionals who will be prepared for a call center career? Not just a job but a real career in the call center. When these new graduates enter the call center company, they already know how it operates because they were taught several hands-on courses on each of the job position in a typical call center organization. Everyone can teach theory but if there is no practical approach to experience the real world, it may not correctly benefit the students. For someone educated in this new way, they may now know exactly what kind of role they want to pursue after being hired as an agent. A few may have decided that in 5 or 10 years from now, they want to manage a specific kind of department. Isn’t this better than exerting a mountain of effort in developing a neophyte call center employee who’s education had nothing to do with the other aspects of the call center organization? Won’t it benefit the companies to lower their cost of training and organizational development because agents already have a general idea and basic hands-on skill to handle other kinds of work past their entry-level agent job?

If you are managing a training institution or a school department that currently provides short courses on how to be a call center agent, and are interested in this technology that can allow you to produce better graduates, contact me and let’s talk about what this technology can do for you and your school.

If you are managing a college or university that’s thinking of incorporating call center courses but do not know how to start it off or what to offer, contact me and let’s talk about how this technology can create a new kind of educational offering to the public.

If you are an entrepreneur geared towards setting up an academic institution but have no idea what kind of call center courses you’d like to offer or begin with, contact me and let’s talk about this technology that can spur your creativity to begin something others have not yet even thought about.

My foreign principals have agreed to provide the academic establishment of the Philippines “FREE” use of their call center solution. This “Corporate Social Responsibility” is not being offered elsewhere – they have agreed to spin it off “first” in the Philippines. The corporate entity is not a fly-by-night organization but a robust and financially stable North American company whose management team are very familiar with the Philippines. Some of them been in the country several times in the past marketing and supporting other call center solutions. This is not like a Microsoft deal where schools are given huge discounts – it is free without any fine print attached to it. The only thing they ask is that schools will use it for call center training to benefit the academic community and the call center industry in the Philippines.

Please note that I am a “Country Representative” of the North American technology company, which means they have no physical and corporate presence in the Philippines other than myself as their sole representative. So, if you ask for my time to meet with you and present the matter of this free technology, I can do so at my availability and convenient location. Rest assured my intention and that of my principals is to propel the Philippines beyond today’s factory worker training style of call center agents and make the country the best location for call center outsourcing in the region, if not the world. To do this, it has to begin with real education. That’s where you come in. That’s your role. So, let’s help each other.

Maybe, your management team is seriously contemplating setting up a business center – an internal call center – to spearhead a full-blown marketing campaign aimed to destroy competition and capture your market once and for all?

Are you a managing director of a small or mid-sized center looking for a better way of doing things so that the speed of executing a client’s campaign is less than a day and the resulting issues will completely vanish?

Could you be the CFO or the business development head of a “larger than mid-size” call center seeking a solution to accept more campaigns without incurring a large cost of expanding your technology infrastructure?

How about the COO of a large, multinational call center who need a standby call center solution that’s capable of the entire suite of features and functions of your existing system, as part of a “Disaster Recovery” plan?

In any business like the call center business, there are three basic things people like yourself look for:

* Solutions to existing problems or issues;
* Solutions to bring the cost of doing business down some more;
* Solutions to create new businesses.

Here’s my standing offer: just give me thirty minutes of your time to find out if my solution is the solution you’re looking for. I guarantee you that in 5 minutes, you’ll know whether I should continue or not, and just let us enjoy our cups of coffee while it’s still hot. It’s not an inconvenience, not a hassle to accommodate me, not a big preparation like it was a wedding event, not much people needed to harness the message to my story. A small, simple “meet and greet” that can turn out to be a social encounter or the solution you’ve been looking for.

Like many consumer products, there’s always a “look and see” or test phase so that all theoretical analogies aside, will this solution really work on my kind of live operations? I’ll make sure you have that if you need it.

There are only two guarantees I can give you about my solution

1. It’s a robust and redundant full customer contact solution using the best technology available, and

2. It’s back by a global Tier-2 class carrier doing 350 million minutes a month or 6 billion calls a year.

Contact me today and I’ll make the time for you.