In this episode of the Grow Fast podcast, Mark Shriner interviews Adam O'Connor, Chief Commercial Officer at Gear Inc., a global outsourcing firm specializing in call center services and trust and safety operations.
Adam provides insights into the complex world of business process outsourcing (BPO), highlighting their extensive network of 26 locations that cover 76 different languages across Asia, South America, North America, and Europe. The conversation delves deep into the nuances of call center operations, exploring how companies like Gear Inc. recruit, train, and manage multilingual teams to provide high-quality customer service.
Adam emphasizes the importance of understanding customer needs, finding the right talent, and creating a partnership approach rather than simply offering a low-cost solution. He also discusses the emerging role of AI in the industry, noting that while technology is advancing, the human element remains crucial in providing exceptional customer experiences.
Throughout the interview, Adam shares his extensive international sales experience, offering perspectives on cultural differences in business negotiations, the challenges of global team management, and the broader impact of BPO on local economies. He highlights how outsourcing can provide significant economic opportunities in developing countries, with BPO jobs often paying 150-200% more than local employment, thereby lifting entire communities and creating pathways for professional growth and development.
You can find the whole episode of the Grow Fast Podcast with Adam O'Connor here:
Adam O'Connor
www.gearinc.com
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This is the transcript for this episode:
Mark Shriner [00:00]
Welcome to The Grow Fast Podcast where we talk with leading sales, marketing and personal growth experts about how companies can accelerate sales, optimize marketing, and grow their businesses fast. Let's go.
Mark Shriner [00:14]
Hey, Adam, how are you?
Adam O'Connor [00:16]
Hey, Mark, very well, yourself?
Mark Shriner [00:18]
Pretty good. It's a beautiful, sunny day here in Seattle, Washington. And where about you located?
Adam O'Connor [00:24]
I'm located in London, it’s beautiful, sunny day here as well, which doesn't happen very often.
Mark Shriner [00:29]
What are the odds of that sun in Seattle and London? The stars are aligned. Something's weird must be going on. Hey, I'm looking forward to talking to you, because you've got a lot of international experience. I know you've done a lot of work obviously, in Europe, North America and in Asia. I've done a lot of work in all three locations as well. Like to compare notes and talk to you about, you know, how you help companies to scale their businesses globally? How do you manage global teams? But before we do that, maybe we take a step back and you can just tell us very briefly about your current role, and you know, the key services that you know your company provides.
Adam O'Connor [01:12]
Yeah, great. Thanks. Mark. So, I'm currently working as the Chief Commercial Officer in Gear, Inc., we're an outsourcing firm. We do Call Center Services. We also do a lot of work with trust and safety, with online teams making sure that all of the content there is safe for people to use. We provide customer service, accountants, that kind of thing for people in a low-cost environment.
Mark Shriner [01:35]
Awesome. So, I want to dig into that, like when it comes to call centers, you know, a couple of places come to mind that would be, for example, Philippines, and then various cities across India. Is that where primarily your teams are based?
Adam O'Connor [01:51]
We've got around about, at this moment in time, about 26 different locations. We do have teams in the Philippines and India, but we also cover most of the languages within Asia, South America, North America, and some European languages as well. So, we cover around 76 different languages under one roof.
Mark Shriner [02:11]
How do you do that?
Adam O'Connor [02:11]
Just with different locations. Different locations can provide different languages. So, in order to, for example, if you look at somewhere like the Philippines. It's great English, low cost compared to the West. But it's also, if you have a look at places like Indonesia, places like that, you can gather different languages from the Asian region within one country, which allows us to open a center and provide more languages.
Mark Shriner [02:39]
That's interesting. I was once involved in a relatively large project for a multinational that was opening call centers in Japan. And what they were trying to do, there was a massive shortage of talent in Japan for call centers. There's, you know, a very interesting demographic. Their aging population, and so on. At the same time, the wages are relatively high compared to what you typically pay call center people around the world. And so, this company was trying to train people in the Philippines to be able to communicate in Japanese, and they had mixed results because, you know. Let me ask you this, when it comes to like, call centers, how do you work? Do you train your people on, like, hey, these are the 100 conversations that you're going to have over and over and over again. Is that where you start? Or what does it work? How does it work?
Adam O'Connor [03:32]
Depends on the customer and where we're looking to put people. So, we tend to do a lot of training in house, but we work with our customers to make sure that we're going to find the right people for them based on what they're looking for, and then with the training as they're coming on board, to make sure that the conversations, the answers, the knowledge base, all of that is placed specifically for the customer. So, we work a lot with the customers to find the right people, rather than saying, hey, customer, you want 100 people who speak French, and us going out and finding those French people, because then it's not going to necessarily work unless they have the knowledge base as well. So, it's about integrating with the companies that we're working with and not just providing the service.
Mark Shriner [04:13]
Okay, let me ask you, I think for most people, they think of a call center. It's like they're trying to get hold of somebody at their bank, or they're trying to get a hold of somebody for a product they bought, and they end up talking to a person in another country, and sometimes it's difficult to understand them for you. First off, what kind of companies do you work with? And then, when it comes to getting the right people in the seats for them. So, it's not, you know, so, the customer experience is good, you know, maybe even talk about some of the key points for that.
Adam O'Connor [04:48]
So, we work with mostly larger enterprises, but we also do some work with some smaller companies as well as they're looking to grow and look to expand their services into sort of 24 by seven. Or expand languages that they're struggling to find locally, and how we do so, we would put together, or we'd work together with a workforce solution team, who will understand exactly what the customer is trying to achieve, what their key points are, what is really important for them in terms of making sure that we're delivering the best possible experience for both their customer and for the customer of ours. Understanding the key drivers of why they're doing it helps us to find the right people as well. So, a project that I'm working on currently, they don't have a very high sort of ticket volume per day, around about 50 tickets per day. But it's really important that the people are articulate, understand the customer, understand the industry a little bit, so, that they can actually give some advice, rather than just going out and finding the person who speaks French having that bit of background and interest, essentially, in the industry that we're putting them into, because as you know, Mark, if you're passionate about something, you can talk about it really easily, whereas if you're just going through the motions, the customer on the other end is going to get frustrated with you. So, we work very hard to find the right balance.
Mark Shriner [06:16]
But at the same time, you really need to get people in the seats. So, I mean, the challenge is recruiting. It's hard. You got to find the right people, and so you must have some kind of I would assume that you have a pretty strong team of recruiters. Processes.
Adam O'Connor [06:33]
Yeah, we're constantly recruiting as well. So, we're constantly doing recruitment. We're building up a database, getting the people ready, so, we have a bit of background of the candidates looking for, what their interests are, how they're going to fit into certain scenarios, what the staff members want to do as well. It's not just about the customers wanting this, but the staff members have got to want to work for the same companies as well. So, finding that balance is where it's really key.
Mark Shriner [06:58]
Awesome. So, you know, you mentioned Philippines, India, then you dropped in Indonesia. What other countries are kind of on the up-and-coming list of call centers?
Adam O'Connor [07:13]
Yeah, Vietnam. There's some African countries that are coming to the forefront now, as well as Kenya, South Africa. Obviously, a lot of people know about South Africa already, especially for the English level within EMEA. Down in South America, you've got Colombia, Mexico, a few countries like that are coming through really strong. Brazil for the Portuguese language is becoming really, really strong as well. But around Asia, I mean, there's so many countries now sort of trying to catch up with India and the Philippines that that those two countries are powerhouses in terms of the outsourcing industry and the call center industry, but they're also quite flooded with different I think everybody who you'd speak to has, as you said, at the start, at the top of the show, everybody's got a office In those two locations. So, it's about finding the right locations. And one of our strategies is finding the right location for our offices as well, because it shouldn't be just in the capital city that looks fantastic and things like that. It should be quite accessible for the staff, because that way, you're going to retain staff if they have to do two hours of traveling to get in every day, that they're not going to last very long. So, we put a lot of thought and effort into that side of things as well.
Mark Shriner [08:30]
I would think that also infrastructure is a really important part of the equation, and these days, you know what type of infrastructure. Back when I had exposure to call centers, obviously, it was more about broadband connectivity and things like that. But what is it now?
Adam O'Connor [08:44]
Yeah, it's still about the internet connectivity, making sure that you've got backup generators, all of the things. So, the UPS is for the PCs, making sure that you're always connected, because the last thing any customer wants is for their whole team to go down. So, we make sure that we have everything set up. We make sure that we can go through everything and make sure in any scenario. So, if, whether it's an earthquake, whether it's a typhoon, whether it's a hurricane, anything like that, we can still find the business continuity plan to make sure that we're always delivering for our customers.
Mark Shriner [09:19]
Excellent. So, you know, I looked at your bio, it's very impressive. Again, you've got a lot of international sales experience. When it comes to selling services, okay, you know, BPO, or business process outsourcing services, traditionally, in my mind, that would be North American companies buying services from Asia. Is that still the general rule, or are you selling because, I mean, your role is international sales. Are you selling all over the world as well?
Adam O'Connor [09:52]
Selling it all over the world, Mark.
Mark Shriner [09:55]
So, surprisingly, with some places that you know that are buying Call Center Services that outside of North America that I probably wouldn't think about.
Adam O'Connor [10:04]
Yeah, so we've got places in Scandinavia, Norway, and Sweden, they're looking very hard at Call Center Services. We've got people in the Middle East
Mark Shriner [10:13]
and they want it in their languages, or are they okay with English?
Adam O'Connor [10:17]
They look for both. And that's why we have so many centers around the world as well to be able to cater for these people.
Mark Shriner [10:23]
So, I just can't imagine somebody in Indonesia speaking Norwegian or Finnish, you know,
Adam O'Connor [10:27]
That's right. But we do have some centers within Europe as well to be able to cater some of those languages. So, but yeah, you're right. Finding the Swedish and Norwegian as well as English within Indonesia is a little bit difficult, so hence why we open the different centers around but the Middle East is really up and coming and embracing outsourcing a lot at the moment, but also within Asia. Funny enough, even within Vietnam, there's companies that are looking to outsource to different parts of Asia because they can't find the talent that they're looking for, or the English level and things like that. So, there's a lot of things going on across the globe. Australia is very, very strong in outsourcing, and always has been the UK and North America, absolutely, as well as, like Canada, but Brazil and South America has a very, very big outsourcing presence as well, which, again, is very weird, so.
Mark Shriner [11:28]
How often do you travel?
Adam O'Connor [11:31]
Probably about nine months. Nine months of the year I'm traveling. I literally just got back from Vegas this weekend. There was a big conference there last week. I was luckily enough. I've got a conference next week in London, so not too far to travel next week, but it's a lot of traveling.
Mark Shriner [11:46]
Okay, imagine you were writing Hitchhiker's Guide to the world for BPO sales people, and you wanted to give some, you know, some observations, let's just say high-level generalities. But let's talk about North America, and let's talk about in Asia's, you know, a huge continent. So maybe you can talk about some specific countries, and then maybe you can do the same through Europe in terms of do's and don'ts, kind of, you know, interesting cultural kind of, you know, subtleties or differences that you've noticed.
Adam O'Connor [12:23]
Well, North America is quite difficult, because there's probably about seven or nine different regions within North America that you sell differently to, and the culture is a little bit different in each of them as well. But across the board, to start with, I'd say the most important thing is to be genuine and be honest with the customer. It's very easy to have an honest conversation and say, This is what we offer. This is what we can do. This is what we're not so good at. How does that fit with your plan? In some of the Asian countries, they actually come to you and say, this is the most I'm going to pay. Can you do it or not? Unless a completely different negotiation, and then we would have in North America or Europe. Within Europe, they're not quite as blunt as they are in North America. So, you might be having a conversation for half an hour before you actually get to the crux of it.
Mark Shriner [13:18]
And I'm on the West Coast of the US, and I moved back here after my last stint in Asia was four years in Singapore, five years in Japan, typically in regional roles. But in Japan, I was very active in the local market, which is probably the most diametrically different market compared to West Coast North America. And I got back here and it's like, whoa. Everybody's in your face and telling you how amazing they are.
Adam O'Connor [13:48]
You can have a conversation for half an hour. The last two minutes are actually about the business where you've been talking about everything else, correct?
Mark Shriner [13:57]
But please continue.
Adam O'Connor [13:58]
Yeah. So, yeah, the only country that comes anywhere close to being as direct as North America is Australia. They're probably a little bit more direct than North America. But there's also some cultural nuances with the sales guys who I work with as well. So, they I have sales guys across the world, and trying to marry all of those different cultures, outlooks, personalities, is also a little bit of a challenge, but something that I love as well, and the team all works together and really tries to help each other, which is fantastic to see.
Mark Shriner [14:36]
So do you I mean, it used to be, especially in some Asian countries, you know, where the after meetings, dinners and maybe go and have a few drinks used to be quite important. And I've seen in some countries where that's really been kind of de-emphasized. Are you seeing something similar? Or there's still some countries that you got to go out and, you know, raise a glass.
Adam O'Connor [14:59]
There's still a few countries but, it's becoming less normal now, in terms of that need to go. I think family in most countries now are rising above the fact that you have to go out with it. There's still a couple of Asian countries, as you say, that you have to go out with a boss on a Friday night. That's kind of how it works. But again, that comes into marrying all of the cultures and working together and educating and making sure everybody, I mean, we get we have get togethers once or twice a year where we try to bring everybody together just to put a face and a name, enjoy some time, do some work, do some strategic meetings, and that works really well. But, there's nobody who thinks, Oh, I better go out until 2am because that's what I should do in my country, kind of thing.
Mark Shriner [15:49]
So then that leads to my next question. Was, because if you're doing that much travel, you know, how do you manage work? Life Balance? It's kind of fit and diet, because I struggle when I'm on the road. One, I have, I get jet lagged. Two, if you know, and then you show up, they're like, Oh, we've got a big dinner. And then for me, the worst thing to do is have a big dinner and maybe some drinks, because then my sleep is even messed up more. And then some of my, you know, my eating habits suffer. I typically will work out like, the first two days of the road trip, I'm committed, and then I make it to day three, and I'm like, Man, I can't get out of bed. It's a real struggle. So, how do you manage?
Adam O'Connor [16:28]
There's a bit of that, but trying to get into the time zone as quickly as possible. So, marrying my sleep to where I'm going to in terms of the travel. So, if I'm on a plane and I'm doing a night flight, I'll try really hard to sleep. If I'm doing a day flight and I'm landing sort of in the afternoon, I'll try and stay awake many, many time. As you said, you land, you have a shower, you have to go out and meet customers or go for dinner and things. So, you just try and eat like you say. Eat as little as you can to set you up for the rest of it. But I think I'm similar to you Mark, after the first couple of days, it's kind of, yeah, I can't do, going to the gym. I can't do this kind of hitting good stuff work. Just have the nap that you need. But luckily, touch wood, jet lag, I seem to deal with pretty well, not crazy, but the first couple of years you're traveling, it's brilliant. You get to see the world as you get a little bit older, and you're doing more and more traveling, becomes living out of a suitcase isn't always ideal, and my wife and children aren't always happy that I'm gone so much so.
Mark Shriner [17:27]
Yeah, at least these days we can, you know, we can do Facetime or Skype calls or whatever with see them, which, but also takes time in planning and everything, you know. So, do you ever wake up and say, wait a minute, where am I at?
Adam O'Connor [17:45]
I've done that a lot. And what time is it? What day is it? I get all of that. So, luckily, I've got a great team, but Hobie, who helped me figure all of that stuff out. So, but yeah, I've had many of time. Where am I this week? What country, what city? So, yeah.
Mark Shriner [17:58]
Yeah. I mean, because you want it when you're showing up, because you're managing teams around the world and you're meeting with customers you want to, you know, have a certain amount of energy and enthusiasm, and so it's you got to kind of manage all that. Let's jump back to the business side for a second. You know, I'm curious about the effects of AI on call centers, because from what I understand, that's one of the industries that potentially could get hit the hardest or impacted the most. What are you seeing now, and what do you expect in the next three to four or five years?
Adam O'Connor [18:39]
We've already seen AI come into the industry, which I think most industries have seen an impact in some way or another. But it still needs a human element. We're not at the stage now where AI is replacing humans. What we're seeing is AI is helping people to do their job and making it need less people to do as much work. So, for example, if you're looking at the quality of calls and you're doing the training, you can use AI there to boost the work that the people are doing there. I think within the industry, what we'll find is the AI will come in more, but what will happen is that the workers that are working now doing the voice calls will actually shift in terms of their skill levels, and there'll be a shift in terms of the people that we're supplying within the call center industry, rather than just people. In the end the phone will still meet, we will find people that are trained in some of the AI bots, making sure, doing the quality and also working with the customers to make sure that we're delivering correctly with the AI. In the trust and safety world, where we're doing a lot of work on online platforms, there's a lot of AI in there.
Mark Shriner [19:59]
But to give you one. Not what is trust and safety?
Adam O'Connor [20:02]
Yeah, so trust and safety is content moderation on websites, on platforms, on games, making sure that people aren't bullying, people aren't supplying sexual images. How do you do that? So we have content moderators who will be in the games, in the rooms, or in the chat rooms or on social feeds, they make sure that all of the content that's coming through is good for the public, and then it gets flagged. If it's not so, AI will have a look. For example, if we use some of the social media platforms, you will use AI to check the images, but AI will flag images of anything, child sex, but sometimes AI will pick up an image with a father and his son.
Mark Shriner [20:51]
Oh, this might be enough to Interpol.
Adam O'Connor [20:56]
That's kind of where we are. And it's not that AI is doing it wrong, but you need that human intervention at the top level to make sure that they know if, yes, this is correct, no, this isn't correct. So, that's kind of where we're heading. So, AI allows more work to be done, and AI will progress, and AI will get smarter and better stronger. But there's always going to be the need, I think, for the human element. And I think if you talk to people on the development side, they will say, No, we won't need humans. If you talk to people on the human side, they'll say, we'll need the human element all the time. So, it's quite an interesting discussion, and I've been having that quite a bit in some of the talks that I've done in some of the conferences I've been it's a hot topic at the moment.
Mark Shriner [21:38]
So, do you have any technologies that you can name, AI-related technologies that are selling big into your industry right now
Adam O'Connor [21:48]
There's so many Mark I'm not sure of the biggest one, but there's everybody's sort of jockeying. It reminds me of the website boom. It reminds me of when the internet come there's so many different companies, and one's going to come out of the pack and be the leader, as it were, the Facebook of AI. But at the moment, there's so many different ones and so many that are vying to get to where they want to be. But I wouldn't say there's one that I would hold as the biggest one at this moment in time.
Mark Shriner [22:18]
Yeah, when it comes to content moderation. You mentioned games. I'm wondering. It's interesting. I watched this lecture on some of the cultural challenges with game localization. So for example, you've got a game, and you've got players in Asia, all across Asia, and you have a map in the game, and do you call Taiwan, Republic of China? Do you call it part of the PRC? Right? And do you call in Korea? Do you call it the East Sea? Or do you call it the Sea of Japan? And you know, it's so there's all these issues. And then you get into the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion kind of issues around there. And so have you come across some of the things that you helped moderate, like, how do you, you know? How do you moderate that in a fair manner?
Adam O'Connor [23:12]
So, you like, yeah, we work together with, if we use a game as an example, the game developer or the game the team that are running the game, the online community, we work together with them to find out the answers to the questions what they want us to do, and we will supply the service that they're looking to do. Obviously, if we're supplying 50 different languages, there might be rules in English and different rules in Thai. Just depends on who we're working with and what they what they feel is their company at home, and we'll implement that for them. So, but yeah, as you said, this is, you know, the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of the USA.
Mark Shriner [23:53]
Is it the I forgot about that one? Yeah.
Adam O'Connor [23:56]
So, it depends on who we're working with
Mark Shriner [23:59]
USA, but Gulf
Adam O'Connor [24:01]
America. Sorry,
Mark Shriner [24:04]
That's funny. I read on your bio that you also manage strategic partnerships. Does that mean that you are co-selling with other organizations?
Adam O'Connor [24:15]
Yeah. So, there's some organizations where it fits quite well and we partner with, there's some call centers. There's CRMs that I've worked with previously. So the CRM would sell people on the back end as well, to help you and your sales team actually fill in the CRM. That kind of partnership is kind of where we're working towards.
Mark Shriner [24:38]
So, awesome. Well, you know you've worked with or you work with salespeople all across the world, and The Grow Fast Podcast spends a lot of time talking about what it takes to be successful in sales. What are your observations, you know? What are the key traits of successful salespeople, and do they carry across most countries?
Adam O'Connor [24:59]
I think there's some givens across the globe. I mean, having empathy and understanding, not being an 80s used car salesman, which some people still tend to think, is the right way to do things. But understanding and consultative selling nowadays is really the way, no matter where you are in the world, that's how you sell and how you work. You're surprised. You're supplying a solution. We've moved so far. Even if you look in the last 10 years, when you come to a customer, they know everything about you already. It's your job to then understand the customer and supply them what they need and things they've already done their research on the internet, the reviews, everything like that. So, making sure that you understand and listen again, no matter where you are in where you are in the world, listening to the customer always listens more than you talk, because you learn more that way. And just being genuine, Mark, I really feel that salespeople that are genuine and make a connection with the person they're trying to sell to are always going to be more successful than somebody who's just trying to sell a commodity. So, I totally agree with you.
Mark Shriner [26:04]
What are some things that, aside from empathy and listening anything else?
Adam O'Connor [26:11]
Yeah, I mean, obviously, make sure that you understand the person, understand what their interests are, work with them, and make sure that you're giving the solution tailored to them. Don't just give one sort of one story to anybody who you talk to, actually understand what the person's looking for, create that connection, and work with them. It's a partnership. At the end of the day, no matter if you're just selling, whatever you're selling, whether it's large or small, it's always partnerships.
Mark Shriner [26:43]
Yep, I totally agree with you on that as well. You know, one of the most challenging things these days, though, is actually just finding new prospects. Okay? Because everybody, everybody's getting inundated with emails, cold emails, warm emails, LinkedIn invitations, etc. You know, what do you guys do? How do you get around that challenge?
Adam O'Connor [27:06]
So, we do a lot of events and shows. And obviously, when you do events and shows, everybody there at the event or show is trying to get more customers as well. But we do a little bit of outreach. We find companies that are doing RFP. But one of the one of the things that we tend to work quite hard on, is finding an industry where we're already quite strong, understanding the landscape of that industry, working with one of the big companies within that industry, and then from there, either getting recommendations or allowing the rest of the industry to know that we're working within that industry and what we can do and our capabilities, that tends to drive quite a lot of traffic towards our website and the forms and calls. So, the inbound stuff builds up with your reputation. But as you know, Mark, it's very hard to build up a reputation. It’s very easy to lose your reputation if you do something wrong. Hence, the talk about the salespeople previously.
Mark Shriner [28:06]
So sure. I'm interested, curious, because, you know, you have salespeople around the world. Do they have? How do you manage their targets? I mean, we don't have to get too granular, but I'm curious to show you have, you know, just farming targets, where you need to grow these accountants. Or do you have also some hunting targets? And so we could give me some description around that.
Adam O'Connor [28:28]
Yeah, we have hunting targets. Um, there's definitely hunting targets there for every salesperson. They have the farming targets in terms of growing the existing accounts that they look after. But there's hunting if you keep all of your customers happy in the farming, the farming should take care of itself. If you've done the partnership work that I spoke about before, and you're selling as a partner, rather than a hardcore salesperson, the farming should take care of itself, as long as you're performing and you're looking after it, the hunting, the going to shows, the doing the research, the getting referrals from your existing customers, all of that is really key to driving your business and driving the revenue within your business. If you don't do that and you just rely on the farming, you're going to really struggle to get the growth that you're looking for.
Mark Shriner [29:14]
So, awesome. How do you coordinate activities with marketing? Do you, because you're the Chief Commercial Officer? Are you telling them, Hey, this is what I want us to do, or you saying, this is what we need to achieve? What are your ideas, so how we can achieve this? Or how does that work?
Adam O'Connor [29:31]
Yeah, we work collaboratively. So, I say to marketing and the sales team, so we'll have a strategic meeting together. We'll say, these are our targets for the year. This is where we want to be in terms of our growth. These are the industries that we're thinking of. What do you think marketing if we're going after these industries, how do we target them? What are their pain points at the moment, let's work towards that. What industry shows should we go to? What events should we be putting on? What. Podcast? Should we go on, all of that kind of thing, just to make sure that we're entering into the right industry. People are getting to know us, to brand recognition, but also having evidence base to show that we can work with these guys, and we've already performed a level where we've helped people within there.
Mark Shriner [30:19]
So, okay, and you mentioned RFP. Do you have a dedicated RFP writer or team, or does it move around? Because usually with an RFP, depending on how complex it is, you might have to involve, you know, people from your operations team, from your IT team, your finance team, all of that. So, how do you guys manage that process?
Adam O'Connor [30:37]
Yeah, so we tend to pull in the experts from each department that you've mentioned there to help with certain parts of the RFP. We have a dedicated team that writes the RFP responses, works with each department, brings in all of the information together, and then we collate it and then try and make it as condensed as possible with the information that we need. The last thing you need when you're doing an RFP is a 200-page kind of response where nobody's going to really look for it. So, you gather all of the information from all of the different experts that can help you. You can lay that into a RFP that the writer and solution designer make sure that everything's there, ready to go over and perform. What we need to.
Mark Shriner [31:21]
Are the RFP in your industry, you know, we tend to see that roughly half the RFP that come out are Question Answer Type. There's just page after page of question answer, and then some of them are more open-ended, saying, Hey, we're looking for the solution that has these requirements. How, what would your proposed solution look like? Which is more? We call that open-ended. You see more of the Q and A or more of the open ended.
Adam O'Connor [31:48]
Probably about 5050, just to make it, it's about 5050, so 50% will say this is the volume of calls we've got. How many people do you think that we need? How would you provide this? Would you put AI agents in? Would you do any of this kind of stuff? The other 50% say, I want 50 call center agents who speak English and French. I want to get this so it really is depend on who you're speaking to, and it's not even the same. If you look at the industries like airlines or social media or anything like that, even within those industries, it's probably a 50/50 split in terms of what they're looking for in the RFP. So, unfortunately, I can't give you an answer there.
Mark Shriner [32:30]
Shifting that answer right there. Now that's good, you know, I just one of the challenges. I again, I was involved with a couple different outsourcing, business process outsourcing projects. In fact, I was involved with quite a few in China, but it was in a very niche industry was, you know, translating financial services-related documents. And you know, you had banks paying people $200,000 a year, paying these bilingual analysts to do a job that they should have a professional translator do, and to pay them 25% of that and give them software that would allow them to, after some time, leverage all the previous translations so that they wouldn't have to retranslate anything that was new, like, if you think about it like a disclaimer on a mutual fund to show, you know, prospectus, you don't have to retranslate that every time, but they were paying for that, right? So, but, one of the and then I was involved in the call center project and some other stuff, but one of the things that kind of scared me sometimes about that space was it oftentimes really did come down to costs, and it was really important for us to not just talk about cost. So, we would talk about value add, like, if you're talking about financial services documents, it was security, and we would put our people on site, and they had a secure system to work on. They didn't take any data with them. They were using company devices that stayed in the office, all of that kind of stuff, right? And because we could provide that, and the low-cost provider couldn't, also because we had better talent and they didn't, we were able to charge a premium with the call center work, it became a little bit more challenging. How do you when you're in a situation where it seems like it's coming down the price, how do you kind of create a little bit of a buffer there where you can maybe take deflect a little bit of the tension away from just being a low-cost provider.
Adam O'Connor [34:42]
So, there's probably three main reasons why people use call centers. One of the first one is to get a low-cost solution to what they're looking for. The second is probably the skill set that they're. Looking for isn't easily available. They don't want to manage the whole hiring process. They just want to hand it off to somebody to do. And the third is
Mark Shriner [35:07]
I just started interrupt. But I think sometimes people underestimate how labor, time, resource intensive, hiring is correct. Say, Oh, well, we'll do that. Yeah. Go ahead and do the initial filtering, do the outreach, do the evaluations, do the hiring and negotiations, go through all of that, yet you have no idea.
Adam O'Connor [35:32]
And then the third reason is really to get skill sets and timing that would be difficult. So, if you're looking for a 24/7 call center or customer success sort of team to look after things, to put that in California, for example, would be really cost-prohibitive. So, people look across it. So, depending on what the customer is looking for, you kind of tailor it to make them, but if somebody is really looking for cost, then they're probably not going to be my customer, because we're not the cheapest by design. We're not the cheapest because we want to keep our staff. We don't want you to have to keep worrying about the churn rate and things like that. So, we make sure that we look after the staff. We do all the things that keeps them happy. We make sure that the offices that we have are nice offices, good workspaces, they're productive. So, if somebody's really driving down the price, and they're saying, oh, I want somebody for $5 an hour, and that's my top I can't do anything. I'd probably turn around and say, You know what, we're probably not the right providers for you. I'm sure you can find somebody else if that's what you're driving but if you're looking for a collaboration with a team that's going to grow with you is going to understand you, we're going to keep them happy, and you can pay maybe $1 $2 more an hour for that person. We're definitely the people for you, and we can, we can help you achieve that. So, it depends on because obviously every customer wants to get the cheapest of the best deal they can. And we understand that, and we always work towards that, but there's some price points that are very difficult to get to if you want to achieve the long-term commitment. So, yeah.
Mark Shriner [37:12]
I mean, I think some companies almost set themselves up for failure when they get the bright idea, hey, we're going to start outsourcing stuff. And then they look at the metrics of how they're going to measure success, and they're like, Well, how much money did we save? And you know what the whole point of providing that service is not to save money. The whole point of providing that service is to deal with your or help your customers and hopefully expand your business and reputation, right? So, look at it that way, and if you bring metrics in, that can sign up, come out, somehow, measure that? Yeah, I gotta say, in the last week, I have had two amazing experiences with call centers where I got somebody on the line right away. They were super helpful, informative, polite, courteous, no BS in the round. And you know, do you know how good that feels? Because usually when you're calling it, I don't care, like I said, banks or whoever you're expecting, oh my god, this is gonna take forever, and then they're not gonna be able to and but when they can actually do it. And one was a financial services firm, and the other was with the Department of Washington State here where I live, and it was amazing. So my loyalty to those two organizations, I mean, here I am saying good things right now, my loyalty to them is massively increased because of that. So, what's that worth? And how can we quantify that?
Adam O'Connor [38:39]
Exactly, you should be looking at things like the average call handling time, the net promoter score from your customers after they've been dealing with these are the metrics you should be looking at the cost. You should get a cost benefit anyway if you're looking to outsource to a low-cost. But don't try and go for the lowest cost, because there is a correlation between costs and quality, right? So, if you go too low on your course, the quality is going to be really difficult for any provider to provide. What you should be looking at is the average handling time, the Net Promoter Score, the satisfaction.
Mark Shriner [39:11]
How do you collect that? NPS and Net Promoter Score information from the end customers in a way that doesn't kind of bother them or make it, make it kind of a hassle
Adam O'Connor [39:24]
Sure, so that we would look at our customer, so, whoever we're engaged with to provide that information, we can do it as well, but it's a lot more, less intrusive. Rather than us doing it, that the company does it. One of the things that some companies do is, at the end of the call, they ask you to hit a number to let you know how satisfied you were with the call, and then let you go on your way. And it takes sort of 10-15 seconds, and then that data is then collected and presented back. So there's different ways that. Obviously, I don't want to get you on the phone Mark and say, thanks for letting me sort that out for you today, Mark, but can you tell me a little bit about how I done and things like nobody didn't want to do that. So there has to be sort of some creative ways of getting that feedback back to the customer.
Mark Shriner [40:14]
Yeah, I, one of the experiences I had this week. They actually said, would you have two minutes after this to answer some questions from an automated survey. And I said, Sure, because I was so happy, and I was like, five stars. Five. Star five.
Adam O'Connor [40:33]
It's also important to understand when people are putting in one star and then it's both it's on the call center to then fix that for the next time and report that back and understand why you would be unhappy, or understand why you're happy, and continue to do that. So again, it's the partnership to make sure that the call center is delivering what they should for the customer, and the customer to have that visibility on the results that are coming back.
Mark Shriner [40:58]
So awesome. Well, we've touched on you know, a couple different areas, if you want to, you know, understand everything that's going on in the BPO space, or where it's going to go. Where would you tell the listeners or viewers to where can they go and learn everything there is to learn about BPOS.
Adam O'Connor [41:20]
So there's a few different companies that collate all of the BPOS giver. Obviously, I'd be happy to talk to any of the customers who want to know. But apart from that, there's some aggregators. There's outsource accelerator. There's the IB pap, which is the outsource, sorry, the outsource, the outsourced group within the Philippines, which is pretty big. There's another one within India as well. Each individual market kind of has its own collaborators, and not Union, but union is quite a scary word for some people, but kind of aggregator for all of the firms and they collate a lot of data and publish a lot of different a lot of different findings as well. There's HFS within the states as well. Do something similar to that. So they collect data and they do.
Mark Shriner [42:13]
Awesome. And then we also touched on sales and selling and sales leadership. Do you have any favorite books.
Adam O'Connor [42:21]
I still follow Neil. Neil Rackham, SPIN Selling is still my favorite book. I still work through that some of the Challenger, methodology, Medic, all of those kind of methodologies. But again, I think it comes down to working with your team, finding where their strengths are, and really putting that emphasis on teamwork and accountability, and ethical selling.
Mark Shriner [42:49]
So awesome. You know, you mentioned, I think you said you travel about nine months out of the year, or you're, you know, you're on a plane a lot. You got a family, though, so how do you stay motivated to work so hard?
Adam O'Connor [43:07]
I look at the family and what I want to provide for them, and look for the future, and make sure that everybody's looked after. We never know what's going to happen in the future. Mark, so we got to do what we can now, but, but also, I feel in my position, I have a responsibility to the staff members who work with me, and also the staff members within the call centers in some of the countries where they're not so well off, and I want to make sure that I can continue to provide jobs for them that help the communities that they're in rise as well. So that's, that's what,
Mark Shriner [43:39]
Actually, yeah, that's, that's something that I hadn't considered. But, you know, you and the other call center providers are really making a huge impact on those communities. I mean, those are jobs, and those are relatively, I would, you know, those are office jobs, right? Compared to, and a lot of those are kind of agrarian societies where, unless you live in the capital, you know you, you know you're the chance job is going to be, you know, 34 years ago was almost nil. So that's, I think you
Adam O'Connor [44:10]
made huge impacts. I mean, when I first started within the BPO industry, the BPOS were paying 150, maybe 200% more than the local job. So everybody wanted to work in the BPO. And it became a really big in the Philippines, in India, in all of these countries, because to do the same amount of work in terms of hours, you would get 20% 25% of the salary, if you're working in local jobs rather than the BPO. So people tend to gravitate towards the BPO job.
Mark Shriner [44:43]
So yeah, and then there's the whole carry on effect, because, you know, those BPOS need infrastructure. So you have all the support roles, you know that they bring in the technology, but then you have both those, and then the people who are working in the call centers, who have are making money and going to spend more than the local economy. It's a huge kind of snowball effect.
Adam O'Connor [45:06]
Yeah, we also, we also worked with some of the universities and schools within the Philippines to help create their curriculum, to make sure that the guys were understanding more on the software development side, but they were understanding what they needed to do for the Western market and show the skills that they would need to then go and get a job within the BPO industry to be able to earn more money than they would locally as well. So there was, it really was the whole community being lifted up by the BPOS. Awesome.
Mark Shriner [45:33]
Well, hey, Adam, really enjoyed the conversation. I, you know, next time we talk, I'd like to talk to, maybe about some specific countries that we both spend time in and kind of swap stories and stuff like that. But, you know, really enjoy your take on selling and providing, you know, these outsourced services. Thank you so much for being on The Grow Fast Podcast.
Adam O'Connor [45:54]
Thanks Mark, thanks for having me, really appreciate it.
Mark Shriner [45:58]
Cheers.
Adam O'Connor [45:58]
Goodnight.
