Latest / The Tech Matchmaker / Why More Companies Are Choosing Nearshore BPOs w/ Travis Currier of TheCallGurus in Tech Matchmaker
Transcript
- Gina Gibson: Hello everybody. Today we are chatting with Travis Currier, who is the VP of Business Development from CallGurus about BPO's. Travis, thank you so much for joining us today. It's a pleasure to have you on. Welcome to the Tech Matchmaker, the show where contact center challenges meet their perfect tech match. I'm your host, Gina Gibson, and in just 15 minutes, we serve up the smartest, coolest innovation shaking up the contact center industry. Whether you're searching for your next solution or just love staying ahead of the curve, we've got the insights to keep you in the know. Let's dive in and discover what's next. I promise you it's going to be fun. Thanks for hanging out with us on the Tech Matchmaker. I hope today's spotlight sparked some fresh ideas and real solutions for your contact center. Want to dive deeper into the tech we featured? Hit up the show notes for all the links and extras and be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if there's a challenge you want us to tackle, don't be shy, reach out. I'll catch you soon with more innovation, more use cases and more ways to keep your business moving forward. Travis Currier: Of course, thank you so much for having me. Excited to be here. Gina Gibson: So, Travis, yeah, let's start with the basics. Tell us a little bit about yourself. And one thing I always like to ask people is tell us something that we won't find on LinkedIn and you can't use the fact that you have like a six handicap as that. Stay curious, stay bold, and keep exploring what's next. Travis Currier: like an eight and half, but okay. Okay. Yeah. My name is Travis courier. I live in Phoenix, Arizona here. So I'm not too far from, ⁓ Gina. I work at the call gurus doing business development. I a wife and two, ⁓ two ⁓ that age seven and four. ⁓ We a lot of sports, ⁓ you we're outside a lot, even in the crazy summer heat here in Phoenix, but, yeah, I don't post post a whole lot about. Gina Gibson: Yeah Travis Currier: pictures or anything like that on LinkedIn. I save that for, you know, either other social medias or not at all. But, ⁓ yeah, outside of LinkedIn, that's, that's my main life for sure. Gina Gibson: Yeah Excellent. And do you want to give us, Travis, the CallGurus elevator pitch? What are you? What is PPO? And, and yeah. Travis Currier: Yeah, of course! Yeah, we are an outsource BPO, which is basically any company who needs help with with the phone agents, you know, can use our services as opposed to doing it internally themselves. So they're outsourcing that side of the business. And the call gurus, we are predominantly ⁓ in Mexico with our agents. So we have a couple different sites and our main site is in Guadalajara, Mexico. ⁓ We ourselves on having very accent neutral agents. ⁓ and even more importantly, agents who understand the unit, ⁓ the culture here in the U S so the vast majority, you know, over 90 % of our agents grew up in the U S you know, for, one, you know, for a specific time or another, and a lot of them, you know, made all their way through high school here. And so because of that, they're able to just understand how, how we do things in the U S you know, certain things we say on the phone that, you know, goes over the head of, of some agents that they can, you know, understand and that they can, you know, relate to and. you know, just sound more casual, make a joke here and there when needed, you know, talk about the weather in certain places just to kind of make somebody on the other line a little bit more comfortable and, you know, allow them to, you know, open up whether it's just a quick qualifying call or, you know, sometimes we do hour long sales calls. So that's who we are at the call beavers. Gina Gibson: Perfect. And what would you say, Travis? There's a lot of BPO is out in the space. What would you say that sets you guys apart from your competitors in the Travis Currier: Yeah, there's a couple things we were just on a call with our leadership team kind of talking all about these things and, and how to, you know, represent that to who we're talking to. ⁓ the biggest thing, number one is the agents. Like, cause if you, can have the greatest company in the world, but if the, if the agents, you know, aren't great on the phones, then it doesn't matter. So the agents are definitely the start. We, ⁓ you know, again, like I said, they're, very accent neutral. They're going to know the, the, ⁓ the culture of the U.S. and no matter what the vertical we're calling on, they're going to be able to relate to people just a little bit more. And of course, being in Mexico, it's going to be a little bit more inexpensive as opposed to the U.S. You know, of the work ethic is a little bit stronger in Mexico, you know, compared to the U.S., especially when it comes to call center agents. But they're obviously going to be much more expensive than, you know, if you're going far offshore where, you know, most of those agents don't know as much about the U.S. culture. ⁓ So our thing is we're going to be able to produce you know, just a little bit higher than anyone offshore and get as close as possible to to know US production as well. ⁓ yeah. Gina Gibson: Excellent. And you mentioned before, you know, some of the fields that you're in or customers that you have, but when or why should people consider outsourcing to a BPO? Like what's the ideal scenario? Travis Currier: Yeah, I would say, you know, one thing we say to anybody on a call is, when they have their own company, they are really good at something. ⁓ is that something is probably not running a call center. They, you know, if they need a call center for, know, whether it's two people or a hundred people that becomes a whole business of its own. ⁓ you know, there's some people who are in the insurance space, let's say, and they're really good at the marketing and the media and generating leads within insurance. and finding buyers and have great relationship with buyers, but they don't want to run a call center. And some of them maybe think that they do, but if they jump into it on their own, they usually realize pretty quickly that this should be something to be outsourced. any size of a call center kind of doesn't matter. It's just such a big ordeal to take on basically a new business ⁓ and even just the department, it's almost a whole new business. ⁓ And course, anytime you're dealing with... With humans, know, it's not like a software where you're just kind of flicking a button and something turns on. It is humans and you're dealing with different things that come up and you know, bathroom breaks and how, you know, the agents relate to each other. And sometimes it's not always a perfect, you know, harmony. So dealing with all of the HR things that come up. we've seen in the past, it is much better and more efficient to outsource it rather than to start up your own basically additional company as a call center. Gina Gibson: And just adding on to that, Travis, what do you think the most important value a BPO can offer and deliver for their clients? Travis Currier: Yeah, for us, we the biggest thing we say at the beginning of any relationship is we want to be an extension of your company. We want you to treat our agents like they work at your company. They just happen to be a part of the call gurus and probably in Guadalajara, Mexico. But we have a lot of our companies who look at us as something that drives profit rather than it's just an additional cost. There's some very low level customer service type campaigns that we actually turn away because we know that the company that we're working for just sees it as a cost item at the end of the day. And you know, every quarter they're going to try to reduce costs, which means they're going to take that campaign away eventually. So we actually do turn away some of those very low level customer service, cause it's just, it's just not worth it. And we don't really become any value to them. We are just a cost item. And so we want to do anything that can, you know, provide profit and bring value. you know, one good example of that, we have multiple different clients that send like swag down to our. ⁓ to our agents in Mexico where they will be wearing their hats, they're wearing their shirts, they have a big banner behind them sometimes that has the company name that they work for. ⁓ so that has lot of buy-in for those agents where they're able to ⁓ feel they work for these companies that are in the US that are making great money and have great margins and all that. But they're ⁓ sitting ⁓ a comfortable, nice call center ⁓ in Guadalajara, Mexico, and ⁓ they that buy-in every day they come to work. Gina Gibson: I love that. is, so in the BPO space, what is one of the biggest myths or misconceptions that people have about BPO's that you would Travis Currier: Yeah, I think the, the one thing we hear all the time is, you know, they just kind of put every BPO in like the offshore corner. Like every BPO is, you know, far offshore and they don't understand, you know, how we work here. They're just trying to get to the bottom line. And, and we obviously, you know, kind of, as I've said, like everything we do is to, is the opposite of that. We want it to be agents who understand what's going on, understand the importance of whatever they're selling, whether it's, you know, a new roof on your house. or health insurance, you know, it's a very big deal, obviously, in the US and everywhere, but, you know, just the little details about each vertical that can go a long way that, you know, most people just assume it's somebody that's very far offshore and they have no idea what I'm talking about. ⁓ definitely are that opposite where we ⁓ understand where, you know, consumers are coming from, you know, no matter what the vertical and how important some of these things are to, you know, to their everyday life. Gina Gibson: And to make sure that happens, do you guys invest a lot in training, Travis? Is that kind of part of your culture as far as making sure that everybody is aware? Travis Currier: For sure. Yeah. There's a couple of different things we do in the training side and our, I shouldn't say new anymore because he's been in that position a couple of years, but our now training manager actually started as a supervisor. So he was on the phones and he was promoted as supervisor and they kind of identified him as a great way to train agents because he was doing it, you know, through QA and ended up training on certain campaigns. And, you know, we changed him into the training role where he's identifying agents right when they get, when they apply. He identifies them as what type of campaign that they should be best for. ⁓ has kind of like a holding campaign we start them in for the first at least week or two. ⁓ And way we can ⁓ kind ⁓ look everything from attendance to production ⁓ of these agents are gonna be able to produce long-term for a new client. ⁓ And definitely goes a long way and helps with retention and attrition and everything that comes with training. Gina Gibson: Fantastic. Do you want to share a success story of one of your clients with us, Travis, as far as what the metrics were and what you guys did for them and... Travis Currier: Yeah, for sure. They, uh, I guess one, I mean, there's a bunch of different kinds of, uh, examples we could go with, but the, there's a, uh, very large debt relief company in, uh, in the U S I believe they're actually the largest, uh, in the U S and they, we kind of had a mutual client together, uh, about three, three and a half years ago now. And they kind of reached out to us and said, you know, Hey, you guys, you guys have something good going on. We can see from the production of this mutual client, uh, where they were kind of the backend for the front end that we were working with. And they said, you know, maybe we should look into possibly working together. Long story short, they ended up flying down to Guadalajara with some of their top leadership. ⁓ saw our site. They saw the agents. were, you know, they loved that they could just kind of pull anybody aside that they wanted to and ask them some questions, ⁓ them, know, you know, their work environment and how they started the call gurus, what the call gurus means, you know, how they're treated, of course, and ⁓ things that kind of are just a culture piece, not just, you production and all that. They wanted to look at servers and all the tech side too, to make sure we were kind of up to snuff and you know, ⁓ internet and all that fun stuff. So now kind of fast forward a few years now, they actually kind of jumped in as a, as a partner of ours where they would kind of send front ends our way. ⁓ we wouldn't be able to not only do, you know, quick front end calls for somebody who's in the debt relief, you know, looking for ⁓ kind of relief from their debt, ⁓ credit card debt, but they also were able to kind of identify agents that could do the full enrollment process. which is, for anybody who knows the debt relief space, that's about a 45 minute to an hour long call. You really have to go over, you know, a ton of different things with the consumer and then also, you know, show empathy because this you're talking to somebody who might be 30, 35, $40,000 in credit card debt, how they got there. And then also, you know, their why of why they want to get out of it. So because of that, you know, we, we, they were able to train our agents, you know, on site for actually a few months. And then, you know, now it's kind of been train the trainer at the beginning and now our training team has taken over that. But now we have, you know, well over hundred agents in the debt vertical who, you know, some are doing the frontings, some are doing retention, and a lot are doing actually the full enrollment process, which, you know, we have some agents that can do about a million dollars a month in debt enrollment. And that is, you know, something that a lot of debt companies in the US are looking for, you know, from US agents. And so the... success story is that now we have, you know, we have a great partner in that company, but also we now have agents that are able to, you know, produce similar, if not the same as a U S rep, obviously being much more you know, a little less expensive ⁓ we're able to do it, you know, for multiple different companies. And so it's grown our company, it's grown these front ends and it's really helped, ⁓ know, this backend as well. So it's kind of been a win-win all around. Gina Gibson: That's fantastic. And so definitely then debt relief and credit. What are some of the other verticals that you guys have seen a lot of success in? Travis Currier: Yeah, we definitely kind of our niche space is the lead generation space, which, ⁓ know, ⁓ a big but also kind of a small industry, depending on how you look at it. But we have basically been in pretty much any vertical in the lead gen space, as well as some outside. So a lot of it is health insurance, you know, things like ACA and Medicare calls and final expense, ⁓ where doing basically qualifying people as far as possible in order to, you know, try to make it a lay down for the license agent. where we're collecting all the information needed to then transfer it to a licensed agent who can then just do their job to enroll this person into whatever type of insurance it is. also do kind of home services where we've done some solar in the past, but a lot of roofing now, ⁓ well as like bathroom remodel and siding and gutters and ⁓ those different things that come with ⁓ services. so pretty much any of those. then a lot of what we do is not like a specific industry, but it's just kind of sales related. where we will sell things like, you know, there's senior chairs that help seniors, you know, get up and down a little bit easier than your typical chair. And we were able to sell that over the phone. That, and you know, there's a couple of different ⁓ One thing we do is an aesthetics company where we're selling, we're actually selling plastic surgery over the phone because that's a massive industry. ⁓ so it's not, you know, it's not, it's kind of specific to a couple of different clients, but anything that's a little bit high level sales is something that we, ⁓ would love to our hat in and ⁓ how great our agents can ⁓ over the phone. ⁓ no matter what kind of vertical or industry it is, ⁓ shown them past that we can produce ⁓ make it ⁓ efficient as possible for the companies. Gina Gibson: Wow, I never would have imagined plastic surgery being sold over the phone. That's quite a unique one. Travis Currier: Yeah, ⁓ it is for sure. And there was a couple extra security measures we had to do with those agents have to be on site, they have to be, you know, in their own ⁓ floor. It's not like you can just walk by those computers either, because there's some sensitive, very sensitive information there. the nice thing is, you know, they're able to use our agents to do, you know, complete a full sale. And you know, those are a lot of you know, it's women sending pictures in of where they're looking to improve, you know, their bodies. Gina Gibson: Yeah, what? Travis Currier: ⁓ But they're talking to other women who can understand where they're coming from. I totally see what they can see, exactly what they're talking about. And again, relate to them where it's not, it's able to be a little bit on their level and kind of you go girl type things. I started with that and very quickly handed that off to the people who are much more qualified than me in that section. Gina Gibson: Thanks. ⁓ Yeah. ⁓ do you see the biggest opportunities in the next year or two for BPO's? Travis Currier: Yeah, I mean, it's a, well, I think we're like 15 minutes in. haven't even said the letters AI yet. So that's a good, a good thing for us. I guess that's probably one of the longest podcasts so far, but, um, all I have to say, you know, AI of course is, is implemented in every good call center now. Um, and ours, we definitely use on the training process, on the agent selection, on the QA side. Um, the one thing that we are making a big effort, you know, have been for, you know, at least a couple of years now. Gina Gibson: Yeah. Travis Currier: to not, like I said earlier, not do those low level, you know, just simple campaigns where it's just a cost that's being looked at, because those are all going to get replaced by AI. AI agents are becoming better and better. And, you know, we are very open and see that and, you know, we get pitched on AI agents all the time. But the nice thing is the very vast majority of the campaigns we do are, you know, they're not going to be able to be replaced by AI at least anytime soon. ⁓ ⁓ I know AI is getting better and better. ⁓ so it might be able to sell one day, but as of now it's, it's not doing any sales related calls. So, ⁓ I'm sure, you know, that's going to be a big challenge for a bunch of different BPOs. We've seen that even in, you know, the surrounding areas of, of where our centers are in Mexico, where there's other centers that are shutting down because they were just, you know, like I said, they were just a cost and item, you know, on, on the, on the sheet of P and L it's just a cost. And now if you can replace that with an AI for, you know, way less than half the price then. Gina Gibson: Yeah. ⁓ Travis Currier: you're going to do it, which makes sense for the company. So our biggest thing is, you know, acknowledging that AI is coming for certain jobs and making sure that we're identifying the right, you know, clients and campaigns where, you know, we're here to do things that humans need to do and, ⁓ you know, do them as efficiently as possible. Gina Gibson: Absolutely. What advice would you give to any of our listeners, Travis, that are maybe considering outsourcing for the first time? Is there anything that they should be aware of when they're talking to different BPOs or what would you say you would tell them the top two or three things to consider would be? Travis Currier: Yeah. I mean, I think biggest, well, there's a couple of things, but the, one big thing is, you know, getting some call recordings and seeing what, ⁓ other clients, the, the BPOs have, ⁓ know, there's, ⁓ we see BPOs all the time where we're never really sure, you know, what they do or what their niche is. And, know, shocked sometimes at how open we are. Like we'll tell you pretty much everything. Like it's, you're going to have to prove it eventually, you know, of course. And then, you know, a huge part of our company, you know, that I didn't mention earlier is our tech side. You know, we have a CTO who's been in the space for, you know, well over a decade now, and he has an amazing team of developers underneath him of dialer engineers. And that's such an important part of any campaign is, you know, understanding the technology that's being used know, using the most efficient technology out there. And, you know, also, you know, from there being able to track everything you want the best reporting possible. ⁓ you know, we, we choose certain dialers and certain. ⁓ tracking platforms that are gonna show the best reporting, you know, of every single agent, every single hour of every single day and look at all the QA side of things and what KPIs are being hit or aren't being hit. And of course, you know, recordings and all that, you definitely want to make sure the technology piece is there. And we've had, ⁓ we were just talking about it this morning on an internal call, but we've had multiple clients who have said, you know, their favorite individual at the CallGurus is one of our tech guys. And, not even just our CTO, but one of the guys on his team who, you know, is in the weeds every day, you know, in the group chats and answering questions, but also giving suggestions like, Hey, if you do this, this and this, there's this chance that you're going to be a little bit more efficient and produce a little bit more. So the tech piece is huge and our tech team, you know, can, can help a ton of different clients and has helped. And we do a little different approach where some of the, some of our clients are on technology that we provide and kind of control. And some of them are on their own technology where they already kind of have that piece set, which is fine. We can just also be, you know, kind of a sounding board like, Hey, we have this dialer and this tracking platform, but can you give a suggestion here? Cause we've kind of seen it all from all the different types of campaigns we've been in. So we can always, you know, be an additional help on the tech side there. Gina Gibson: And I think it's great too, so it's you can bring your own or bring your own tech or use your tech in that case, right? Yeah. Travis Currier: Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of the ones, you know, the clients that we onboard who, you know, like their own technology and want to use their own technology, they still ask us all the time, you know, like, what have you seen in the past that, you know, maybe we're not doing and you know, we're not going to, of course, you know, break any NDAs or anything like that. But we will say generically, you know, in this vertical or in this space, we've seen that, you know, if you tweak here and here and here, you can actually improve, you know, a little production or you can increase that contact rate or whatever the case may be. ⁓ that, you know, again, we're the nice thing is we're, all on the same team. Like we want them to, to be successful so that at the end of the day, they're just gonna, you know, increase the, our, our size, you know, add some agents from us. So the nice thing is we're coming at it from, you know, all being on the same team. And one side wins, you know, both sides win. that, definitely helps. Gina Gibson: Absolutely. Perfect. And so just to wrap things up, Travis, I've always been a fan of James Lipton. And so we're going to do a few rapid fire to close it out. What is your favorite word? Travis Currier: ⁓ perfect. Okay, let's do it. ⁓ my favorite word? I would say let's go with family. I think anytime ⁓ says family, know, you know, it's it's coming from a heartfelt place. Gina Gibson: Yeah. Absolutely. What is your least favorite? Travis Currier: I would say as far as recent goes, maybe synergy. There's so many, ⁓ guess, ⁓ many LinkedIn messages that say, you know, let's look and see if we have any synergies between us. So as of late, that's probably been my least favorite word. Gina Gibson: It's so funny I'm waiting for somebody to say AI. Travis Currier: Yeah, that's true. That might be up there. I don't know. That's a good point. Gina Gibson: And what excites you the most? Travis Currier: I think, ⁓ new, new challenges that can lead to something awesome. Like we, one thing we, we talk about all the time is we're onboarding, you we try of course to onboard the right clients who can scale. And so when we, when we, when I'm able to bring, you know, a new client to the team and say, if this goes well, you know, X can happen, you know, that's pretty exciting, you know, for me, of course, but also, you know, for our team internally where it's like, Hey, this, new client that we just got introduced to could become our biggest client. You know, that's always very exciting. Gina Gibson: love it. And Travis, if somebody wants more information or to carry on the conversation about VPOs and the call gurus, should they call? Travis Currier: I would say they can contact me directly for sure. pretty easy to chat with on LinkedIn or on my email or ⁓ reach out to me any way you have it. ⁓ then of course, ⁓ you, Gina, with ⁓ that ⁓ guys have going on, Gina's been a great resource for us and you can contact her in order to get ⁓ ahold us too. And she's been great to kind of recommend different things for us, both on the tech side and also for some new clients as well. So ⁓ either of us on here, I think would be a great start. Gina Gibson: Excellent. Travis, thank you so much for your time today and for joining us. It was great learning more about call gurus and always fun to learn more stuff about BPOs. So thank you so much for coming. Travis Currier: Of course. Of course, thanks so much for having me.