What is your company's specialty and mission statement?
CCC Interactive is a full-service inbound, outbound and e-CRM contact center
services provider, supporting clients in the financial services, energy/utility,
telecommunications and consumer products industries. Our reputation has been
built on five key commitments to our clients: exceptional quality, superior
people, responsiveness/flexibility, constant improvement and value creation.
Our proven record as a trusted and innovative team player and a significant
number of industry awards illustrate our team's core commitment to our clients
and their customers. The unique combination of management experience, motivated
telephone associates, continuing training and development and innovative
technology allows CCC Interactive to be one of the most cost-effective,
efficient and results-oriented solutions available today.
Our mission statement reinforces this commitment to our clients:
' To provide a seamless extension of our clients' customer relationship
management program by being a premier provider of customer care, acquisition and
retention services.
' To build strong client relationships and strategic partnerships through
quality people, excellent service and superior technology, resulting in an
exceptional CRM product and outsourcing value.
What makes your services unique and how can customers benefit by using them?
As you can tell from our picture, we are a company of people, a team formed
around the goal of providing unsurpassed quality and service. This is
demonstrated in four critical areas:
People. We believe our people are the key to our success. By building our
company on this fundamental philosophy, we have earned a reputation for having
the industry's most responsive and flexible workforce. CCC Interactive has
developed a proprietary candidate hiring process that enables us to better
profile, identify, screen and hire agents, thus resulting in better performance
to our clients and their customers. Our staff works in a team culture that
promotes positive attitudes, commitment to quality and the desire to succeed,
and offers the opportunity for workers to enhance their knowledge and be
recognized for superior performance.
Quality. Based on Six Sigma and ISO guidelines, CCC Interactive employs
innovative processes and technologies to deliver performance, accuracy and
quality in every customer contact. Peer and supervisor quality coaching, a
skills enhancement/associate development program and various performance
incentives have combined to drive optimum performance. In conjunction with our
quarterly client satisfaction surveys, we conducted formal quarterly reviews
with our dedicated client project team, ensuring constant improvement
initiatives every 90 days. This process results in a superior outsourcing
product to our clients with each customer contact.
Experience. CCC Interactive has solid experience within major customer-based
industries and provides services in four languages. In the financial services
industry, we have been named the number-one credit card acquisition vendor
several times by one of the nation's largest premier financial institutions. We
have successfully partnered with some of the largest energy companies in the
U.S., providing products in regulated and deregulated markets. In
telecommunications, we have managed high-volume programs including
long-distance, DSL, wireless and bundled product programs. CCC Interactive is
proud to have been recognized by Customer Inter@ction Solutions' magazine as one
of the Top 50 Teleservices Agencies and an MVP Quality Award winner for
excellence in quality and customer satisfaction.
Service. Our commitment to our clients' satisfaction is unwavering. By
understanding our clients' businesses and with a dedicated account team drawn
from a well-educated, globally diverse population, CCC Interactive provides
creative campaign development and execution, flexible problem solving and
superior customer service. We become a virtual extension of our clients'
initiatives, enhancing their customer care, acquisition, retention and
satisfaction programs.
In this environment of continuous improvement and a total commitment to quality,
our people provide the experience and motivation our clients demand from our
strategic relationship. The results are superior client representation, customer
contacts, customer loyalty and a high return on investment.
What is your vision of the future of the CRM/contact center/teleservices
industry?
Over the past 20 years, the teleservices industry has grown exponentially in
both technology and human resource deployment. This has resulted in more
profit-driven differentiation of services in the internal and outsourced contact
center arenas.
In the short term, over the next 36 months, there will be a reverse drive away
from technology and price-based outsourcing toward a more traditional model that
focuses on shareholder revenue, retention of customers across the clients'
diversified bases and value on the outsourced investment or simple ROI. Both our
industry clients and their customers want to be treated as individuals, not
transactions, or by an automated e-mail or a disembodied voice across an endless
IVR menu. This will create a strategic shift from technology-based solutions to
live agents. The demand for these live agents to multitask, service, sell and
cross-sell a client's products as well as communicate across both voice and
e-mail venues will create a need for a more highly trained and skilled agent.
This will define these new agents or their ability to sell, cross-sell, service
and manage customer relationships across different media.
Products and services will then become differentiated by client, not price.
Within each client, specific differentiation will occur by individual client
customer portfolios. This practice of diversifying and segmenting individual
customer portfolios by brand, habit and demand will become the complete
realization of what CRM services will deliver. The client will individually
manage all projects to ROI with the emphasis on constantly increasing customer
share of wallet and retention. For the last several years, economies of scale
and technologies to drive contact center savings have been the drivers for
production. Today and in the future, quality service and revenue by human
contact will become the strategic initiative. Our industry will be charged with
growing our clients' portfolios and developing non-industry-specific solutions
for sales and acquisition while also preserving brand identity. The industry
will be required to create e-commerce and voice perception of excellence for
customer service, to execute projects and exceed metrics, and to maintain an
appropriate ability to scale capacity up and down as the client's needs change,
all while providing a seamless, solutions-based approach for service and
delivery challenges. Additionally, our business practices will be focused on
developing quality assurance practices that rival ISO or Six Sigma guidelines.
Adding to the challenge, the industry will have to execute all of these
processes while increasing client shareholder revenue and closely managing
expense. We are poised to design, implement and deliver the high-end solutions
demanded by the competition in today's economy. We believe that our focus of
exceptionally trained agents and innovation in product and campaign design will
lead the industry.
What, in your opinion, is the most pressing issue facing our industry
today?
There are two pressing issues facing our industry today: legislation and
economic growth.
Telemarketing is the single most effective direct sales medium and is critical
to companies in almost every industry. Call centers employ more than six million
workers and generate more than $600 billion in sales annually. In addition, it
creates and provides employment in B and C cities, for minorities, the elderly,
persons with disabilities and other part-time workers. CCC Interactive, as well
as other reputable teleservices agencies, holds itself to very strict
telemarketing guidelines and maintains all required do-not-call lists to ensure
the highest level of call compliance. We were also prepared for the FTC
regulations prior to April 1st and the subsequent postponement to October.
Unfortunately, legislation will not stop the truly unwanted telemarketing, since
unethical companies selling scams and illegal products and services are
initiating much of that activity. It is doubtful that this group will ever
comply with any do-not-call list or federal regulations.
The pending legislation will bring our industry additional expense in order to
acquire the technology, maintain data and manage the multiple do-not-call lists
to assure compliance. The potential challenges with sales performance, in
addition to these expenses, will cause telemarketing to become a more expensive
channel for companies to market their products.
The depressed economy has put strain on corporations to maintain growth. As a
result, this has increased internal financial pressures and lessened the focus
on metrics that improve customer service. Hence, our industry has not seen the
level of growth anticipated in the past 24 months. As economic conditions
improve, we do expect corporate outsourcing of call center services to increase
dramatically, especially in light of the needs to increase revenue, retention
and ROI.
What are your recommendations to alleviate such problems?
The government needs the counsel of leaders in our industry, from both the
outsourcing and the business sides. The DMA and the ATA have already enacted
standards for our industry. These high standards must be the core of future
legislation. Involvement in the political process, our industry organizations,
contribution to industry legal funds and the education of our elected officials
will provide great benefits.
From our perspective, outsourcers need to assure their preparation and
certification of compliance with current legislation is completed well in
advance of the targeted implementation date. The requirement to upgrade or
replace existing technology, educate our workforce and deploy the infrastructure
to meet the requirements and manage DNC lists and the archive data will be
critical to the survival of many outsourcers.
What is your vision for future trends for the contact center/CRM/teleservices
outsourcing market regarding profitability and international competition?
Governmental regulations, of course, will impact the expense, time and
training required to do business in this new environment. Service delivery and
contact technologies (i.e., growth of the Internet) will need to be constantly
updated to meet our clients' and the market's demands.
Maintaining competitive services, pricing and quality in the face of offshore
competition will be a management challenge. Offshore outsourcing currently
supplies a niche and a need for corporations, and will continue to provide a
strong solution for certain low-contact functions. As the economy improves and
the focus turns more heavily toward quality customer service and the need to
retain customers, the emphasis will shift back markedly to domestic providers.
We are and will be ready to focus, implement and deliver.
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