Services > Contact Centers & Outsourcing
Vendor Procurement
Conducting inductive and extensive evaluations to determine functional and cultural fitness in vendor sourcing and onboarding.
SBR harnesses decades of multichannel contact center management to select only those best suited to a company’s internal culture and functional needs. Our evaluation methods do more than look at raw data and standard call metrics. We review how outsourced contact center vendors manage the day-to-day engagement between agent and prospect or current customer so that they can function as a seamless extension of the organization. Whether in sales and/or customer service outsourcing, we diagnose the core needs of the outsourced contact center solution and define an optimal partnership strategy. SBR supports clients through the entire sourcing process, including:
• RFI/RFP development
• Vendor evaluation protocols
• Formal onsite vendor review
• Proprietary secret shopping methods
Clients have saved more than $2M through strategic consulting and vendor negotiations with competitive pricing and program longevity management.
Vendor & Program Management
Hands-on techniques ensure go-live and post-live performance.
We drive program success by building a solid vendor foundation that reflects your internal company’s practices, products and cultural behaviors. SBR often remains onsite with an outsourced partner in the early stages of program launch to ensure optimal performance and uniform transition of programs to the outsourced operation. We align all human and technological resources for success, including:
• Call strategy, processes and procedures
• Interactive voice response (IVR) design
• Knowledge management & wikis
• QA performance & monitoring
• Reporting & data analytics
• Specialized contact center training
• System optimization (including CRM, ACD, QM)
• Workforce management (WFM)
SBR’s specialized expertise in contact center selection means that we can see beyond marketing tactics into the specific operational qualifications of vendor operations to prevent potential future challenges. We transfer the same methodology to our clients so that they can continue to foster a successful vendor partnership in the long-term.
Automation & Technologies
Helping contact centers build agent-centric tools to support callers and call performance.
Human-centered technologies are not relegated to consumer products. A user-friendly automation system is the lynchpin of a high-performing contact center operation. Over the years we have watched cumbersome user interfaces impede a call center agent’s ability to support the customer. While the agent is busy searching for information, the caller exchange is often strained, not to mention the frustration created by the inefficiencies, misinformation and long call times.
The immersive assessment in the contact center allows Team SBR to quickly learn how agents work, where tools are and aren’t working, what they need and what they need to better connect with consumers. We quickly identify how to streamline call interactions using a combination of Rapid Ethnography and agent shadowing, historical data, and call monitoring. By maintaining a fixed focus on available technologies, we are able to provide solutions that realistically adhere to a company’s current systems and available resources.
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Our Client’s Take
“We presented SBR with a pretty daunting task: help us build a sales call center from the ground up, man it with the appropriate personnel, train these new associates (and our company) to understand the importance of consultative selling and the skills required to provide this service over the phone, and build the infrastructure and support system to make the new unit successful for years to come. Building the unit appropriately with our limited consumer sales experience would have been nearly impossible. Getting the unit built out appropriately and in full operation in time would have been totally impossible without SBR’s partnership. Now a year later, our consumer sales results are further validating the decision to bring SBR on board.”
Executive Director, Health Insurance Company