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Contact Center Outsourcing Provider Frontline Drives Substantial Growth with Help from inContact

By Susan J. Campbell, TMCnet Contributing Editor

As more and more companies are recognizing the value of cloud computing and outsourcing options, contact center outsourcing is experiencing growing demand. The Frontline Call Center is one organization reaping the benefits of this growing demand, especially now that it has inContact's cloud-based platform.

Frontline, a well-known contact center outsourcer, struggled for more than a year with a hosted telephony provider and experienced a full range of problems from excessive system downtime to inadequate reporting software. inContact, a leading provider of cloud-based contact center software, stepped in and provided the necessary platform to carry, route and track customer calls.

Located off the coast of Washington on Orcas Island, Frontline did not have the option of premised-based call center equipment. The contact center outsourcer also faced limited technical, financial and quality labor resources. Founder Jill Blankenship understood the use of a SaaS (News - Alert) model for the company's phone switch, automatic call distributor (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR) system and related components was necessary.

The first vendor selected caused a number of problems and lacked key features Frontline needed, including skills-based routing and e-mail and chat support. In addition, this solution was unable to match agent time spent on outbound callbacks to a specific customer account. As a result, 17 percent of Frontline's work was unbillable.

Blankenship was so dissatisfied with the service's reporting software, offshore technical support and inability to accommodate basic staffing and IVR script changes, she needed to make a change. After an evaluation of a number of on-demand call center offerings, the contact center outsourcing provider selected the inContact platform due to its reliability, comprehensive software suite and strong customer references.

This switch to inContact has made a significant business impact for Frontline, including helping to increase revenues by nearly 225 percent in the first year. Over the next 12 months, revenues jumped another 175 percent - even in a global recession. inContact also helped to spur a near-doubling of agent utilization within this contact center outsourcing provider.

"When inContact added click-to-call, that gave us a new tool enabling our clients' customers to connect to an agent from their website without picking up the phone. When they added support for Salesforce CRM, we were able to interface with that application for customers who needed it," Blankenship said. "Each of these enhancements gives clients and prospects another reason to use our services."

By transitioning to the inContact platform, the outsourcing contact center provider was able to take advantage of the home agent platform. By early 2010, 60 percent of its agent base worked at home from as far away as Virginia, Georgia and North Carolina.

"Our agents who work at home tend to be more mature, have more schedule flexibility, are sick less, and allow us to ramp up quickly if we have unexpectedly heavy call volumes because of a particularly compelling client promotion or infomercial," Blankenship noted. "We can literally have extra people staffing the phones within one or two minutes."

With the successful implementation of the inContact solution, Frontline has been able to enjoy rapid growth. This contact center outsourcing company continues to enjoy year-round growth and the creation of new revenue streams by hosting other call centers on the inContact platform.

"Switching telephony providers is the smartest business decision I ever made next to coming up with the Frontline concept in the first place," she said. "We could have the best agents in the world, but it wouldn't matter if we didn't have the technology to support them. With inContact, we have everything we need to optimize our own operations as well as service to our customers."

To learn more about how inContact improved Frontline's operations, click here.