With both inbound and outbound calling as well as chat and e-mail support available, eTelecare provides onshore, offshore and near shore call center services on three continents.

by Jeff Goldman [November 26, 2008]

The outsourced call center provider eTelecare was founded in 1999 by Derek Holley and Jim Franke, who came from the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company. "They were very familiar with working with best-in-class corporations, and decided that there was an opportunity to participate in the outsourced business," says Mark Skoog, eTelecare's director of marketing.

eTelecare Tel: (877) 375-0002

Initially, the company focused on providing offshore support from the Philippines, but with the purchase of U.S.-based competitor Phase 2 Solutions in 2004, eTelecare added onshore services to its offering. The company, which now has 15,000 employees in three continents and an annual revenue of more than $300 million, currently offers call center services from the Philippines, from various locations throughout the United States, and also from its newest near-shore call center, which was recently opened in Nicaragua.

That wide range of locations, Skoog says, can make it easier for eTelecare to persuade a client to consider using offshore services. "They can first bring the business to U.S. call centers—we perform well, the clients have a good experience—and then we're able to convince them that the same best practices we use in the U.S. we also use in the Philippines, and simply due to the difference in the wage rates of the two countries, we're able to offer comparable service there at a significantly lower rate," he says.

The company also has an at-home agent program, which helps to minimize attrition. "The attrition rates in the U.S. for this industry are 10 percent plus a month," says John Alaburda, eTelecare's vice president of sales. "So basically, you're looking at turning over 100 percent of your workforce every year. If you can reduce that, retain folks and significantly lower that attrition, you deliver better value to the clients, because you have higher-trained and skilled people that have been doing the program for a much longer time."

eTelecare has also purchased additional locations in the Philippines, including an e-mail and chat facility the company acquired last year from AOL. "Most of our service offerings were in the voice arena, handling inbound or making outbound calls," Alaburda says. "The purchase of the AOL center in the Philippines gave us a presence in the non-voice sector and allowed us to continue serving AOL from that center."

Performance and pricing
One of eTelecare's key strengths, Alaburda says, is its performance management process. "Every one of the folks on our payroll has an at-risk portion of their pay that is linked directly to the operational results of our clients," he says. "That ranges anywhere from 20 percent all the way up to 50 percent… and it really drives a synergy amongst all the functional organizations within eTelecare to deliver quantifiably higher results."

While eTelecare may not be the cheapest provider in the business, Alaburda says, the results speak for themselves. "In one of the sales programs that I have, we're at 0.3 sales per hour," he says. "Our nearest competitor is at 0.22 sales per hour. So even though we're a little more expensive up front to the client, when you net it out based on what it costs for each sale we make, we're much less expensive."

The company's pricing is generally structured per production hour. "We do have some unique arrangements where we do per call or per subscriber, but the majority of our pricing and arrangements are based on a per hour model," Alaburda says. "We also have some hybrid models where we're paid a base rate on a production hour basis, and then we get bonused over and above that based on our results."

And Alaburda says the company usually only works with clients that will need at least 100 to 200 seats. "Volume below that doesn't fit our model from an investment perspective, because we do invest a lot in the programs to make sure they're successful," he says. "So if it's a 10 or 15 seat program, it just doesn't make sense for us or the client."

Driving results
Each client is assigned a dedicated eTelecare client service manager. "If you need any changes to take place, you have one person to go to who then coordinates with training, recruiting, operations, in order to implement any changes going forward...and every quarter, they identify a key project with the client that will add value back into the client's business," Alaburda says.

As an example, Alaburda says, eTelecare recently worked with a DSL provider to increase the sales of its highest-speed service option by 20 percent. "We analyzed our scripting and sales strategy and reworked it in order to make the highest-speed offer more prevalent in the call," he says. "We changed the compensation plan to the representatives in order to drive those results higher. In one quarter, we were able to increase by 20 percent the percentage of sales of that speed to the client's customers."

With a client that's using more than one outsourced call center, Skoog says, eTelecare strives to remain at the top of that client's list of providers. "We have a periodic review where we go through and ask a series of questions and have them rank us, and in the vast majority of the cases, we are the client's number one outsourced partner," he says. "That's our stated corporate mission—to be our clients' number one business partner—and everything we do reinforces that and makes that possible."

Alaburda urges any ISP that's looking for an outsourced provider to take a close look at all the available options. "The vast majority of the time, the people that are looking at making a decision to outsource look at the pricing and take off the people that are at the higher end of that pricing spectrum—and never inspect the processes behind it to look at the value that's going to be created on the back end," he says. "So come out, kick the tires, sit down in our centers, get on some site visits, and let us prove to you that this isn't just rhetoric—it's actually what we do every day that will drive results back to your business."

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	[June 18, 1999]	Pricing Your Services Part 1: Dial Access Basics

Online resources:
	Outsourced Customer Support Directory
	Quick Reference Chart