I had the pleasure recently of visiting with members of the management team of call center solutions provider Amcat International. (news - alert) During the course of our conversation, they indicated that a lot of the companies they encounter on a regular basis, many of them customers, don’t refer to themselves as call centers. I’ve encountered this phenomenon as well. Sure, they’re buying call center solutions, they have employees who make and take calls to and from customers, they use call routing, dialers, IVRs, workforce management, headsets and CRM and/or sales force management solutions. But they’re genuinely surprised when referred to as call centers. “Call center? We’re not a call center.”
It seems that to a lot of people, if you’re not interrupting North American families between bites of baked chicken and green beans at dinnertime to sell them aluminum siding, you’re not a call center.
I’ve been thinking about this phenomenon for the last few days. How do you market to companies that buy your products but don’t believe themselves to be in your marketplace? I find it a little like the tiptoe marketing that needs to be done for men’s skincare. Skincare for men is a very hot growth area right now. Companies like Nivea that never had a particularly girlie image are doing well, but the more female-oriented companies are having to launch new lines, with manly names, to avoid being associated with cosmetics. It’s not moisturizer, it’s “after-shave balm.” It’s not exfoliator, it’s pumice toughening scrub…the pumice no doubt ground up by Thor’s hammer in a particularly manly way. And remember...the men aren’t doing this to look better or try to get rid of wrinkles or age spots...nuh-uh...they like the smell of the products.
In the same vein, I was recently shopping in the dried fruit section of the supermarket and came across a bag of product that was labeled “dried plums.” No, they’re not prunes...they’re dried plums, and don’t you forget it. It seems prunes have developed a tarnished (or wrinkled?) reputation over the years as something to be taken, like medicine, when nature doesn’t...err...move along as she ought.
So how does the call center industry overcome the malemoisturizer- and-prune complex?
To many people, a call center is something that is outsourced. We hear a lot of negative news lately about “call centers being outsourced to [fill in your country of choice].” Years ago, few members of the general public had ever heard the term “call center.” Now, most people understand the term, but only as it applies to jobs flying offshore to Southeast Asia. Maybe this is why the industry is filling up with acronyms...customer service facility, CRM center, customer interaction management center or just “the floor”.
Or maybe it’s the fault of the vendors, who use the term “call center” for their products less often than you might think. Companies all have an appellation they create for themselves. It’s that line you see in their press releases just after they mention their corporate name for the first time: “Acme Inc., a leading provider of customer-enabling and total lifecycle management enterprise solutions, announced today that someone finally cleaned out the grotty microwave in the break room” or “Mimsy Enterprises, a best-of-breed b-to-c provider of knowledge-nibbling database solutions for increased customer delight, has nothing to say today but thought it ought to issue a press release.”
I take calls regularly from people looking to find out how big the call center market is. “How many call centers are there in the U.S.?” they ask. I answer, with perfect frankness, “I have no idea.” Another answer to that question is, “How long is a string?” Many of these callers are Wall Street types looking to get an investment picture of the marketplace.
There are certainly many, many call centers. There are also many help desks. There are many customer service departments. There are lots of internal sales departments. There are a lot of mobile, wireless networked knowledge workers. BPO companies are popping up like dandelions. Are they all call centers? Are only the dinner-interrupting, baked-chickenruining aluminum siding sellers call centers? Are only the outsourced entities call centers?
This industry does itself it no favors when it dodges the term “call center.” It’s not a dirty word. Instead of the extraordinarily immense unified marketplace it ought to be...between all of its bits and unaligned pieces it employs as much as three percent of the North American workforce...it too often resembles a collection of like objects striving hard to point out how they are different from one another. A collection of things that are not like the other ones may be educational on Sesame Street, but it doesn’t attract investors or skilled management talent. It doesn’t build a positive picture of the industry in the general public’s mind.
So...call centers and call center solutions providers of the world, stand up and say, “Yes! We’re a call center! We sell call center products!”
And if you ever witness a man suddenly leaping up and yelling, “Yes! I use moisturizer!”, give him some encouragement. And be sure to eat your prunes.
The author may be contacted at [email protected].
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