Answers on Offshore Outsourcing Businesses

“Clouds”, for the last few years, has been the buzzword in the IT industry. When I say clouds, I don’t mean the fluffy white stuff in the sky that takes the shape of bunnies or babies depending on who’s looking. I think of clouds like virtual lockers that you can access anytime and anywhere you want. Clouds take the form of word processors, spread sheets, presentations, and other specialized applications.


channel sales strategy

While some of the clouds are free and open source like the Google docs that cause developers from Microsoft to gnash their teeth, most of the commercially available clouds are classified as SaaS or Software as a Service applications, meaning, instead of users paying a one time, big time fee to install the software, they pay a monthly or annual fee to keep using the application. To keep up with the evolution of clouds, do vendors and partner need to come up with new channel partner strategy?

Channel partners were at first, understandably worried about this innovation. In their minds, they were thinking, is this the end for me and my company? Who needs my services when users can directly access the application from the Internet? You see clouds are nifty in that you don’t need to install software to use it. Applications are easily accessible through browsers and all you need is a reliable internet connection and a PC or laptop and viola! You can access your files and perform transactions online. However, software vendor or in this case, cloud providers do play a vital role in educating the customers.

For VARs or Value Added Retailers, the mode of payment may change but the business just evolved to include more customers who can afford the applications they sell. Channel partner strategy for cloud products seemed to be pretty much the same as when they are selling traditional software licensing. Incentives and commissions are still there to motivate channel partners to sell not software per se but subscriptions to applications instead.

Declining productivity has been one of the most prevalent problems in our Philippine call center that I will not name in the interest privacy. Employees were always late, absent or just generally in a “non-working mode” as they coined it.

As a project manager, I was concerned, of course. In the long run, all of us will find ourselves unemployed when the client gets fed up and find another call center company to partner with. As any good manager would do, I turned to the Internet for solution.

There, I found out that what we lack were technological solutions and innovations that help companies increase production. The WFM or Work Force Management solution is a particular interest to me as it allows administrators to streamline their back processes like payroll, human resources, career tracks, training, scheduling and a lot more. Team leaders can now monitor the attendance of their agents and keep track of their performance. Our working environment became more efficient, needless to say.

Another innovation we had implemented was the transition from traditional telephone to VoIP or Voice over the Internet Protocol. The company saved a lot of money with the move as we only have to pay a fraction of what we usually pay the telephone company. With this transition, we used the soft phone technology that combines various technologies in one telephony system.

Our inbound calls were made more efficient with the IVR or the Interactive Voice Response included in the software. This freed some of our agents from unnecessary calls from clients that are asking for FAQs or Frequently Asked Questions. The Automatic Call Distribution or ACD automatically distributes incoming calls to agents the moment they are free.


Philippine call center

As our operations also include a telemarketing service, the predictive dialing of the system became a most valued tool to stop agents from idling in between calls. The productivity was so impressively high and our clients were very happy with the improvement that they renewed their contracts with us.

I think our story proved that Philippine call center having trouble with productivity issues need only to research solutions for their issues. There are all these technological innovations available for every call center and it’s never too late to update their processes.