Significant Growth In Software Packages and Revenue

Kathleen Kelly, president/CEO of privately held TeleDirect International, Inc., has much to celebrate this year with a 35 to 40 percent increase over last year in total revenue. Helping to drive the growth is a boost in transaction size due to additional solutions the company is delivering.

"We've added 30 to 40 optional software packages to our suite this year. There [are] probably about 1,000 different features and functions to choose from within our solutions."

Call Center and Predictive Dialer Solutions

The Scottsdale, Arizona-based firm's Web site mentions providing predictive dialer and call center software solutions.

"One of the reasons our business is up is we offer a solution beyond just the predictive dialing. We're calling it a customer acquisition management system which includes everything that they really need to initiate and manage customer transactions to increase sales.

"We've had a lot of our customers, particularly since the Do Not Call … legislation, start doing … more intelligent marketing campaigns."

Kelly said customers are not only calling their existing customers, but they're also doing things to drive inbound traffic.

"There's a campaign management engine—whether it's an outbound call or an inbound call—it automates all the processes surrounding that transaction. We'll go out before we install a system for a new customer and we'll do quite a bit of detailed discovery, and then we document all the processes that are manual in that contact center and automate all of them."

Offering Sizable Return on Investment Drives Success

When asked to describe her firm's greatest core competency, she said "delivering a compelling return on investment." Then she discussed going into a company with about 500 outbound agents across three centers.

The initial estimated return on investment had been nine months.

"This call center hadn’t been profitable, but within three months the system paid for itself, increased sales 10 percent and reduced agent training time from two weeks down to four hours." Kelly added that 80 percent of the company's customers are "'not the major outsourcers," and are "in-house operations" in sectors such as cable TV companies, vacation ownership, newspapers, mortgage and finance.

In-house Operations Dominate Customer List

Kelly added that 80 percent of the company's customers are "not the major outsourcers," and are "in-house operations" in sectors such as cable TV companies, vacation ownership, newspapers, mortgage and finance.

"We're talking to them about their entire marketing program. We're delivering a system that can be used for all customer contact, whether it's inbound or outbound." Kelly described as "just awesome" what some of her firm's customers are doing "now that VoIP is out there."

"Some of our customers who toyed with the idea of offshoring decided not to do it. With the advances in technology, they'll put their servers in one center ... and then they can light up centers anywhere.

"Some of our customers who toyed with the idea of offshoring decided not to do it. With the advances in technology, they'll put their servers in one center ... and then they can light up centers anywhere." "It's so easy to open a new center in a rural community that would welcome them with open arms. All they have to do is go in there and put in PCs and phones and they can be up overnight. Now that VoIP is there—it's practical, it's economical—the tools we've been able to give our customers for centralized campaign management and flexibility on where their call centers are just throws the whole idea of having to worry about going over to India or somewhere out of their mind."

Perception of Home Agents Changing

When asked about home agents, Kelly discussed the transformation regarding how they are perceived.

"In the old days they didn't want home agents because they couldn't manage them. Now, with technology, the agent just logs on and they're able to monitor the agent, they're able to listen to them, they're able to watch their screen, they're able to do everything." Also mentioned by Kelly was the "ton of customers" stating they "thought they needed" a CRM solution.

"But what they really needed was a solution similar to CRM that’s going to help them make more sales. They're looking for something that can provide to the agents the right tools to make transactions and intelligent communication with the customer really, really easy. I call it CRM made simple.

"It's something that’s more affordable than the multi, multi-million dollar CRM implementation and it helps customers achieve what they need."

CRM Solution Critical to the Market

She described her market as being geared toward a CRM solution with routing inbound and outbound calls a subset of that. Kelly added that 90 percent of her company's new customer orders have an outbound component, but only about 20 percent are outbound only.

"They don’t have to spend millions. We've competed against CRM vendors with our solution and they'll be in there for a $2 million solution that’s going to take them a year to implement and we'll go in there for $200,000 and have it up and running in six weeks with a payback in less than three months."