Marketing your company’s services by pay-per-performance using offshore call centres seems such an easy way of increasing sales without risk. However, very few companies have actually made it work. Rob O’Malley is The Chief Operating Officer of Asian Call Centers. He examines why many of these projects fail.

The Development of Pay-Per-Performance

Pay per performance isn’t new but it is now more important to the outsourcing industry both domestically and offshore than ever before. Most offshore outbound centres write their business plan with the intention of not accepting any work unless it is hourly paid. However, with the over-capacity in the offshore call centre sector, vendors have increasingly looked to fill this spare capacity with pay per performance activity. For many offshore centres, it now represents 100% of their business. Even call centres which had been established exclusively for inbound realised that they needed to offer additional services in order to gain much needed revenue and so now offer some outbound services.

For many sales managers, it seems to make perfect sense. It has also made an opportunity for a new wave of call centre brokers who saw an opportunity to offer a low-risk service to Western companies and business for business-hungry centres overseas. Indeed, there are now many clients from both sides of The Atlantic using offshore call centres for such services and many more who are using intermediaries or brokers to do it for them. However, there are very few success stories and it certainly hasn’t stemmed the demand for call centres domestically which would have been the obvious bi-product if it had provided anywhere near the success that many had anticipated.

Why So Many Failures?

To fully understand why so many fail, it is important to see what happened differently in those projects which have succeeded. There are many success stories. For example, at Asian Call Centres, we have clients in various industries that we have done work for a long time on a pay-per-performance basis and continue to make the programs work for both us and the client.

The first important thing for all parties to bear in mind is that programs don’t develop as quickly in offshore locations. For example, a project which takes 2-3 weeks to start working successfully in a domestic centre will normally take 8-12 weeks in an offshore centre. During this time, many clients become impatient and their effort to help the centre get the project working profitably can often wane. This often starts a chain reaction which leads to the call centre dropping the program prematurely having lost money. It then becomes common knowledge around that area that the program is “unworkable” which means that other centres locally won’t touch the project.

Many clients or brokers often pre-empt the notion that their program is “unworkable” and take on as many call centres as will take on their project very quickly. The only issue as to whether the call centre gets the project is whether they want it. The client and/or their intermediaries then generally spend a minimal amount of time with each centre hoping that 1 or more will make it work with the plan being to give more focus to them. This may produce a relatively large number of sales in a short time due to the volume of centres and hence agents working on it. However, this is normally short-lived as the centres drop off one by one. Setting up a telemarketing project to the UK from an offshore location is not a part-time job. It requires the full time focus of British people for a sustained period of time for even a chance of success. Splitting this focus across multiple centres is destined

The other sign of failure is when there is no representative of the client at the centre. Many companies simply email the centre a list of prospects, a script and a set of objections and then leave the call centre to fail. Some people underestimate the agents in offshore call centres but they all know that when there is no input from the client, the client doesn’t have faith in the program. When agents start to think like this, then failure becomes a self-fulfilling destiny.

It’s also important to ensure you are using the right intermediary if you are using one. Some of the more unscrupulous brokers who have been in the business for some time have a reputation among call centres for bringing them poor quality business. If you use one of these brokers, your project will either be overlooked or treated like a second rate project regardless of how good the opportunity. Worse still, the best call centres have a blacklist of brokers who have brought them unsuccessful projects and so the broker is left with the poor quality centres that are desperate for work. For those brokers who have entered the industry recently after hearing of the growth in offshore telemarketing, there are different challenges. They generally believe that being a broker is money for nothing and usually don’t understand the scope of the requirements to make a project successful.

For those companies who get past the first couple of months and are achieving enough sales that the centre wishes to continue, there are still challenges. It is always important to remember that the deal must be a win-win situation for centre and client. Among other things, this means paying the call centre on time. Given the history of unscrupulous clients and brokers, call centres are now often more concerned about getting paid than making a profit. There is also one British company who has used a lot of offshore call centres to telemarket their services. They find one call centre in Manila making the project work and they tried to reduce commission rates believing that the call centre did not need that much money to make a profit. However, the reason the centre had made the project work was because of its superb training, develop and management systems it had in place. In fact, these were the same reasons they have made many campaigns work. With the revised commissions, the program was then the least profitable campaign they had and so reduced the team size dramatically and eventually dropped it. The moral of the story is that there are very few good offshore call centres and so when you find one; treat it like you would treat your best customer. For most, this just means paying them enough money in a timely manner but there may be something else.

In conclusion, offshore telemarketing is still a viable option for many businesses. Although it is not something which should be taken lightly, the rewards for those who supply the resources and effort to develop the program are great. You should definitely consider working with an intermediary such as ourselves as the learning curve can be very steep when dealing with developing nations. It’s also important to be patient and to focus lots of attention on a limited number of centres.

Asian Call Centres help British and American companies to outsource call centre activity to The Philippines. Their range of services includes centre evaluation, contract negotiation and program management.