TMone offers a broad range of services, including everything from inbound and outbound calling to marketing lists and database processing.

by Jeff Goldman [December 24, 2008]

TMone was founded as a call center consulting firm back in 2002 by John Burchert and Anthony Marlowe. "We had worked together and had a lot of success operating insourced contact center services for the telecommunications company MCI," recalls Marlowe, now TMone's president and chief marketing officer.

In 2003, TMone opened its first call center and began offering a wide range of outsourced services, including both inbound and outbound calling. In the years since then, Marlowe says, the company's most significant development has been a consistent expansion of its target market. "We've diversified into financial services, and into broadband and VoIP selling," he says.

TMone Voice: (866) 577-2461 info@tmone.com

The company also launched a database management division, using the brand name Discount-Lists. "We do database processing and provide marketing lists to all sorts of businesses, from the mom-and-pops all the way up to the Fortune 500s. Our database management division is now responsible for a third of our company's revenues," Marlowe says.

In early 2006, TMone took over MCI's former facility in Iowa City, Iowa, a 27,000 square foot, 300-seat contact center. "The Iowa City facility is our main hub for our CRM offering, where today we specialize in business-to-business telephone account management and customer relationship management for financial services companies and telecommunications companies," Marlowe says.

Focused on B2B
The company's contact center services, Marlowe says, are now largely focused on the business-to-business space. "We've got a lot of agents that are higher end, and we've got a lot of marketing intelligence via our database division, with access to a lot of targeted lists that yield higher response rates at a wholesale level," he says.

TMone recently opened a new contact center in Des Moines, Iowa, and is planning to open additional offshore centers in 2009. "One is going to be near shore, and one is probably going to be in the Asia area," Marlowe says, noting that the company has thus far referred smaller clients seeking offshore support to a global network of partners—though that may well change with the addition of the new centers.

Of course, any new offshore centers would also be available to TMone's larger clients. "The BPO industry has proven that you need to be offshore to have significant value. So, to be a niche B2B player onshore and to support all the normal functions, with some good anchor marquis clients both off and on, we're building value and creating opportunities for our team," Marlowe says.

Marlowe says the company takes great pride in its personnel—and one of TMone's best ways of attracting talent for its contact centers, he says, has been through Facebook. "Because of their ability to do social targeting, we can target by age and interest, and whether they're in college or not, things of the like," he says. "Some of our best employees have been acquired off of Facebook advertising."

Breadth of services
Ultimately, TMone's greatest strength may simply lie in the breadth of services the company offers. "CRM is a full circle: there's sales, there's marketing, there's customer services, development, training, human resources, database analysis, database management," Marlowe says. "CRM is not just software: you need to have the technology, the personnel, the strategy and the data analysis that goes along with it."

Imagine, Marlowe says, a company with 100 inside sales agents taking incoming calls for a broadband product. "For a company like that to be able to say, 'TMone, we want you to take this business process and migrate it to your facilities, and instead of us paying $9,000 a month fully loaded on it, we're going to pay you $4,500 a month fully loaded,' that's a significant savings," he says.

That company would then benefit, Marlowe says, from TMone's expertise as well. "Our technology is better, it's all-inclusive, we have worldwide capabilities and a dedicated staff—this is what we do for a living," he says. "And it's simple. It's one bill, one check, one stamp, one envelope… or one ACH. It makes a lot of sense."

That's particularly true, he says, in the current economic climate. "Some of the Fortune 1000 companies are tapping out thousands of their field sales associates and moving them to outsourced partners, cutting the expense by 40 percent, and doing it all over the telephone," Marlowe says. "So we see our business expanding rapidly in 2009 and 2010 with respect to the economic conditions."

For ISPs in particular, Marlowe says, CRM is becoming all the more important as they add new offerings. "We all know consumers are a volatile customer base to have, and as ISPs migrate their strategies. They should not be afraid to invest in CRM post-sale, even though half the time it's a cost that's not in their budget—because it reduces their customer attrition enough to pay for itself," he says.

— End

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Online resources:
	Outsourced Customer Support Directory
	Quick Reference Chart