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[February 05, 2004]
Lessons from listening in
New company draws $1.5M to study call-center conversations
Howard Lee saw an opportunity when he discovered a little-known fact about the call-center industry: While callers to most centers are greeted with a recording stating, "Your call may be monitored," in fact most calls are not.
"It's the dirty secret of the industry, that no one ever listens to those calls," said the former Disney executive and former CEO of Seattle's PhotoWorks Inc. "Even if they do, most companies rarely sample enough calls to get a statistically accurate picture."
The company Lee launched, HyperQuality LLC of Seattle, aims to fill this knowledge gap by providing its corporate customers with daily reports, with up to 40 different assessments, on how call-center personnel interact with callers.
The company makes this level of reporting possible by using low-cost workers based in New Delhi, India, to monitor the calls. Customers can sort the data by individual employee, by manager, or by shift, and they use the data to compare quality at different call centers, said Lee.
Customers of 8-month-old HyperQuality include catalog retailer Lillian Vernon, now owned by Direct Holdings Worldwide LLC in New York. Tom Scott, operations vice president and chief information officer, said the company has been using HyperQuality to compare effectiveness at its company-owned call center in Virginia with outsourced call centers it is using in Oregon and in India.
"This data has really helped us evaluate the magnitude of our issues," he said. "It's going to be a significant factor in whether we go forward with this India outsourcer, or even whether we go forward in India."
Along with HyperQuality's data, customers get several daily suggestions on ways call-center employees can improve their performance, Lee said.
"We should be able to help that team's sales go up," Lee said. "We can see quality go up, first-call resolution go up, handling time go down, upsell rates increase."
The reports can also help when it's time for employee reviews, he added. If managers have only listened to a few calls, it's difficult to use them to criticize employee behavior.
"In the past, people could say, 'I was having a bad day,' " Lee said. "Now the manager can say, 'No, it's consistently poor, and here's five or six things you can do to improve.' "
To fund HyperQuality, Lee has raised $1.5 million from individual investors. They include former U S West Multimedia Communications executive Bob Hawk and Kevin Doren, a former venture-capital investor for Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen.
Doren said he was attracted to HyperQuality by both the company's premise and its management team.
"I was pretty comfortable with Howard as CEO -- I've known him for a while," Doren said. "But one of the concerns with funding new businesses is, is there real demand for the product? After conversations with prospective customers, it was clear there was."
The company has grown to 75 employees, 10 of whom work in HyperQuality's offices in Seattle's Pioneer Square. Customers are charged based on the number of minutes per week they'd like HyperQuality to spend listening to their customer calls.
Lee said the company's India-based work force is now listening to some 10,000 calls per week, monitoring the performance of about 3,000 call-center workers. That's only three calls per worker weekly, but it's far more than the industry typically monitors.
He's not wedded to the idea of using overseas workers, though. One prospective client has asked if HyperQuality might hire U.S. workers to monitor its call center overseas, and Lee said if there's enough demand from customers willing to pay the higher rates that domestic workers would require, the company will provide monitoring from the States.
Though he can't reveal the names of most of HyperQuality's clients, Lee said they span the technology, retail and travel industries, with banking and health care being other target markets. New services coming online soon include Spanish-language call monitoring.
Call-center consultant Rebecca Gibson, who is manager of educational services at the Incoming Calls Management Institute in Annapolis, Md., said she is aware of few other companies providing HyperQuality's level of call monitoring. She said many companies might benefit from using an outside company to evaluate call quality, because they field a huge number of calls and simply don't have time to listen to a significant number of them.
Staff writer - sales@hyperquality.com
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