Monthly Archives: November 2016

How do I find a call center?

Categories: Call Center | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Are you looking for a call center to help you with appointment setting, collections, sales, technical support, chat support, or customer service? 123outsource.net has a wide selection of call centers that is well organized and always growing. New agencies are always joining our list of call centers, so you can always find call centers within seconds.

On 123outsource.net you can find inbound call centers, and you can find outbound call centers. You can find international call centers, as well as domestic. You can find call centers in any part of the world such as The Philippines, India, Costa Rica, Jamaica, USA, Canada, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, and other places as well.

So, if you need help to find call centers, with a list that is updated regularly, you are in the right place! We hope you enjoy and benefit from our list of call centers on 123outsource.net.

A programming company that charges $25,000 per week? They should charge by the minute

Categories: Software Development | Leave a comment

$8.33 per minute!
I did a meditation to help me find the best software company in the United States. I tuned into the cosmos for half an hour and got my answer. The company would be in Florida near Tampa. Sure enough when I queried .Net programming companies in Florida, this excellent company came up. They even had a cool name that starts with a number, just like my site! www.352inc.com. In addition, they have the coolest looking website I have ever seen a programming company have. With the type of revenue they are making, they can afford a nice site! The salesperson explained how the company worked and how they finished huge projects in just days using a business model of having four person teams. After they finished projects, they could also assign an independent programmer to touch up code that needed tweaking if you could commit to eight hours per session.

But, what if the team experienced problems? I would be out $4000 per day during any snags in the process, or would I be? Hmmm. And what if they needed me in the middle of the project and couldn’t reach me at the critical junction? Then what? If I had some experience with this company, I would hire them in a flash. But, it was just too much. They were in the fast lane and I like to proceed at a more cautious speed. I think they would be perfect for larger companies. I think they would be perfect for me too — if only they could give me half a programmer rather than a gang of four! 20 hours a week is half a programmer and that is perfect for me providing he is the right guy.

When I hire programmers, I like to interview each one by hand. I like to see if they have the right thinking skills, communication abilities and personality for the job. Working with an unknown team of four would make it impossible to verify if things would go well. Too scary for me, but perfect for large companies who know this company well.

The new Google Algorithm will whoop your non-mobile behind!

Categories: Analytics | Leave a comment

I was one of the first people to have a mobile page for my site to get search results. However, if you found city or state search results directly on Google it would not go to a mobile page. So, now I realize that I was ahead of my time a few years ago, but I haven’t been paying attention.

Mobile is where it’s at, and if you don’t have mobile pages for your site, you are not catering to roughly 50% of the traffic out there. Why do people like using their mobile devices so much? I don’t know. I use mobile for checking Twitter and Facebook stats, reading leisure blogs, but nothing more. I use a desktop for serious work.

Google’s new algorithm will penalize your site if it is not mobile friendly. And your blog needs to be mobile friendly too. But, the good news is, the minute I got my blog mobile friendly, my stats went shooting up the same day. My Google visits are up 40% the day I got the mobile plugin. I’m just hoping my site traffic will go up equally much when I adjust the pages to be mobile friendly as well.

The bottom line here is that you could lose 30% of your traffic by not being mobile friendly on the new Google algorithm, but once you fix your pages to be mobile friendly, the traffic will go shooting up within hours.

How often do you give raises?

Categories: Management | Leave a comment

How often do you give raises? The art of raises and rewarding your employees for deserved behavior, but avoiding running the risk of overly rewarding them and making them think they deserve another raise before they’ve earned it.

My solution was to give raises every 90 days to full-time people and every 180 days to part-time. I realize that this is a powerful strategy, however there were a few kinks to work out. Someone full time will feel a sense of moving up in the world if they are always getting raises. Keep in mind that you need to set their starting salary a little lower for them to merit raises. Also keep in mind that they need to merit the raises with an increase skill set and hard work. Most people are very short sighted which is why 90 days raises are so effective. Google uses this strategy by the way! After a year or two, the raises will become a little smaller. You also have to give people more responsibility otherwise they will not feel useful. Letting them learn new skills is very important to many employees who want to feel like they are growing, while others specifically do not want to grow at all.

The flaw in my system is that my part-timers seem to put in as much time as they feel like. This is not good for long-term employment. Those who are not reliable in their hours will not last long, or will not be that valuable as employees. It seems more sensible to have a starting wage while in training. Then have them put in 400 hours before getting a raise. If they are slow pokes and do five hours a week, it might be two years before their first raise. But, this way the raise is based not only on how much they learned and produced, but how much loyalty and hours they put in too which is a very important factor.

Someone who sticks with you in the long run is valuable, especially when combined with versatile work skills. So, reward people for everything.

These days with millennials, especially in India, there is a lot of job hopping. You cannot get ahead in any career by job hopping. But the time you half know what you are doing, you’ll be at the next company. For managers, knowing they have someone good to do a job is important. How well will they know your work if you hop from job to job? If you are dealing with perpetual job hoppers, I would give them a lower starting salary simply because you’ll have to invest time hiring and training them only to have them quit. Let them pay for this out of their salary and reward them later on if they stay.

What is important in dating is also important in business

Categories: Hiring & Firing | Leave a comment

When you go out to find a date, your friends will push their narrow-minded views down your throat. They will insist that the girl comes from your type of background, has the right type of job, and dresses the right way. In my experience, none of this matter, not even a little bit. I dated a girl from the right background, the right spiritual group, the right type of job, and the right type of family — it was the worst relationship I’ve ever had and broke in a very painful way.

Years earlier, I dated someone from a different continent who was not educated, hardly spoke English, was eighteen years older than I was, and had nothing in common with me. I had a much longer and more pleasant relationship.

After I summed up all of my platonic and romantic relationships and friendships and figured out what was good and bad about each one, what I discovered was…

1. The relationships that lasted the longest were with people who were from a similar class whose parents were from the same educational level and/or level of sophistication my parents were from. But, they weren’t necessarily from the same country.

2. In romantic relationships what matters most is:
Chemistry, Conversation, Cooperation, Consideration, Similar attitudes about abortion, Similar attitudes about sexuality

3. In marriage what matters most is
Family — whether you get along with them, Attitude about saving & spending, Type of job the other person has, Spiritual Views, Cultural Views, Common Goals, and Loyalty (perhaps this one should come first)

As you can see, the list for marriage and romance are completely different the minute a commitment is there — at least from my point of view.

Finding an Outsourcing Company
So, what if you were looking for a BPO to hire, and you talked to a few of the managers for a while. Would it make sense to hire a company because you felt good chemistry with them?

CUSTOMER: I really like your voice.

RAHUL (BPO MANAGER): Gee thanks.

CUSTOMER: I feel like we have good chemistry together and a deep connection.

RAHUL: That figures, I majored in chemistry in college. This connection is pretty good. It’s Fios.

CUSTOMER: I’m looking for a meaningful relationship with an ePublishing company

RAHUL: We can deliver meaning in any context — online or book format — your choice. But maybe we can shoot for an eFling first.

CUSTOMER: That’s not what I meant. I’m looking for a deeper friendship

RAHUL: I”m not sure my wife would be okay with that. I’ll have to ask. Or she could come along

CUSTOMER: I just feel so happy when I meet everyone’s family.

RAHUL: You obviously haven’t met my sister. Just one more question…

RAHUL: Yes. Yes.

CUSTOMER: What are your views on abortion?

RAHUL: I’m pro-choice: eCommerce format or PDF.

CUSTOMER: We mesh perfectly. I’m finding you very sexy right now. What are your attitudes about saving and spending?

RAHUL: I save for a rainy day. And I spend on umbrellas.

CUSTOMER: Spiritual views?

RAHUL: I pray it doesn’t rain today. I just washed my car.

Every time you call and get someone charismatic will make your business seem amazing

Categories: Management | Leave a comment

When people call your business, what kind of people do they get to talk to? Do your prospects or customers talk to smart people, dumb people, helpful people, ignorant people, or charismatic people? If you give your customers a good phone experience, that can make quite an impression. Charismatic people might not come cheap, but neither is losing out on hundreds of great customers that you are losing by hiring losers to answer your phone.

Nobody has to know the truth about your company. Nobody has to know that you hire lousy people. If people call and get to talk to a different interesting person every time they call, they will have the impression that everybody that works for you is amazing. The truth might be that only four out of two hundred is amazing, but the customers won’t know that unless they visit your office. And even if people visit your office, have the charismatic people jump out at them and chat them up and offer them some coffee or chai.

It doesn’t matter what the ratio of great employees is to terrible ones. What matters is the perceived ratio. If every interaction I have with your staff is amazing, I will have an amazing impression. If most of your workers are amazing, but you only let me talk to the terrible ones, my impression will be terrible. You can manufacture an experience at your company, so design it the right way to make the right impression.

5 popular call center benchmarks

Categories: Call Center | Tagged | Leave a comment

f you want to hire a call center, give them a quiz over the phone and see how well they know their benchmarks or benchmarks of quality standards. If they say, “huh?” maybe you have found the wrong call center.

Service Level
How many percentage of calls were answered within a particular time frame? If 80% of calls were answered within 20 seconds, that is very impressive. But, how many can achieve that?

Average Speed to Answer
Many of your callers might be on hold for a while in a queue. How long does it take for your average call to get answered?

Abandonment Rate
How many of your calls hang up before an agent answers?

Call Duration
How long was the call. If your agents talk too long with your clients, you might be popular, but won’t be able to handle many calls in a day.

First Call Resolution
If an agent can handle 90% of calls and resolve them singlehandedly , that is fantastic. Other agents need to transfer calls and get others involved. The value of a call center agent lies in their ability to resolve issues.

Quality
I’m not sure if this is on the list. But, there are certain factors in the call center business that cannot be measure with stats. If someone has a pleasant voice, comes to work regularly, doesn’t quit after severa months, and is nice to the clients, that is actually more important than any of the more statistical metrics associated with the call center industry!

You can’t be behind when you behead

Categories: Management | Leave a comment

The joke is that extremists in Iraq who like to cut people’s heads off were late to an appointment. All of their friends were there wearing ski masks with the video equipment ready, but two guys were late to the beheading. The leader of this satirical extremist group scolded them on their tardiness and said, “You can’t be behind when you behead! Next time will be your last!!!” The late guys said, “Gulp?”

But, having a business is just like fighting a war. You are in a sense beheading the competition or getting your head chopped off by them. If you are always behind on your work, your business will never grow. Your customers will always be upset with you for your sluggishness. Most businesses want to use manpower efficiently and make sure that each labor resource is used to its maximum. The problem with this is that you won’t have time for last minute emergency projects, not will you have time if existing projects take longer than anticipated.

If you want to grow your business, hire more people, buy more computers, buy more inventory, make things bigger. If you have a little extra available labor resources, your business can grow. If you are always up to capacity, there is no room to grow. The analogy is having a city on an island. If the city takes up all of the island like Singapore, then there is nowhere to grow unless you find a way to build into the water. You need new land to put your buildings and farms.

So, stop being behind. Start finding ways to have more labor capacity and more managers ready to assist. Have people who are ready to answer phones who can communicate well. I wonder what the Mayans would say about this article — they did lots of beheading back in the day!

If you are sluggish paying people you owe – metaphysical realities

Categories: Of Interest | Leave a comment

The beginning of the month was very sluggish in sales. I knew our industry was slow, but it had never been this slow in over ten years. Since I “study” metaphysics by observing reality, I was thinking that perhaps there is a metaphysical solution to this problem. Sales had been down by 40% and I was not sure if I would have to change the way I do business to compensate for this loss. However, I noticed one thing. I was behind paying my programmer by a few weeks. I owed him $3000. The minute I wrote the checks and put them in envelopes, the incoming money flow shot up immediately.

Another thing I noticed is that tything or giving money to reputable charitable organizations really helps keep your income up. Metaphysically speaking, if you help others, and sacrifice your heard earned money for the sake of someone else’s welfare, the universe will help you succeed. The universe’s goal is to help the worthwhile people make their way up the totempole and keep the selfish people at the bottom.

So, if business is slow, or you need better luck, be better about paying people, tything, and do daily prayers as well!

Does it make sense to have a minimum wage or raise it?

Categories: Of Interest | Leave a comment

It seems nonsensical to have a minimum wage. In a free market economy wages are set by supply and demand. The minute some socialist government like the government of the United States wants to start meddling with wages, there will be a lot of unemployment. Young boys who have never had a job are not worth minimum wage. They’ll sit around unemployed and then get into selling drugs while illegal Mexican immigrants take the jobs that those young boys were morally entitled to. Although the illegal immigrants are paid under the table, they are paid a market wage which is about $4 per hour which is a lot less than the $10 per hour in California. Now, they want to raise the minimum wage.

Minimum wage means unemployment for blacks and more illegal immigration which brings crime, drugs, kidnappers, mafia, and more. Having minimum wages increases the chance that employers will have to break the law out of economic necessity. After all, how can you hire Americans and give them benefits, when your competition is hiring illegals for $4 per hour with no health insurance?

Since America is a country that is selective about which laws they enforce, you should have less laws. Less laws means less problems enforcing whatever laws you keep. If they enforced illegal immigration laws, there would be fewer workers which means higher market value wages. In that case, the market wage for restaurant work and other cheap labor might be $12 to $15 per hour without government meddling.

What about having a maximum wage? Nobody has ever talked about it before. Maybe doctors shouldn’t get paid more than a certain amount. Maybe a clerk at McDonalds shouldn’t make more than $15 per hour no matter how good they are. I feel we are regressing deep into socialism while China has become a playground for capitalists. Invertendo is the word my spiritual Master uses to describe this situation where we become the opposite of what we were and someone else becomes what we were instead.

Blogalytics, an unexplored art

Categories: Social Media | Leave a comment

If you do any type of web business, without a rudimental knowledge of web analytics, you will soon be out of business. Analytics can tell you which blog post people liked, how many visits you got on particular days, and how many seconds or minutes they stayed on the page. They can tell you which page they visited after they left your page, and which page they came from before. But, there is a lot that analytics cannot tell you.

If blog entry #254 got eight clicks, how many times was it promoted on Twitter or social media? Your analytics might not give you the whole picture.

If your blog entry did well the first time you promoted it on social media, it might not so well on subsequent tries. Your analytics will not be able to predit the long range predictability of your articles.

If you put a particular blog entry that is unpopular on the top of your feed and one person reads it, how does that affect your overall blog traffic? Sometimes I will put a popular blog entry at the top of my feed for a day or two before publishing anything else. Often times it will not get clicked much, but the blog traffic for the day will be a lot higher.

I have decided to employ a completely new strategy for my blog. There are posts that are experimental. I enjoy exploring new topics because they are fun to write about and sometimes lead to finding a new and popular topic to write about. However, most of the time, my readers do not share my enthusiasm for these new topics. My question is, how can I do my exploration and experimenting without alienating my readers? My solution is to use the first few days a month to try these topics out. I will publish an article every 8-12 hours so that if the readers don’t like it, the blog will submerge in the feed soon after. I have also decided to remove unpopular posts a few days after they are published. That way my feed will be all popular posts.

Another strategy is to create links from older and more popular articles that place well on google, and link them to newer less popular articles. On my blog, the articles from 2011 get the majority of the clicks while articles from 2016 that are often much better get none. I need to constantly change the links around to emphasize newer and more interesting content.

Do we still have freedom of speech?

Categories: America | Leave a comment

America was founded based on people having certain freedoms, one of which being freedom of speech. But, our freedom of speech is so inhibited, that we kind of don’t have freedom of speech.

If you talk about anything religious or political, people might tell you to be quiet, or accuse you of being sexist, racing or politically incorrect just for mentioning certain religions names or expressing any type of idea.

The next issue I have is that there are different rules for black people than there are for whites. Black people can use offensive racial (racist) language and get away with it while whites cannot say anything without being accused. Is it fair? Whites are always accused of being racist whether they are racist or not while Asians and Hispanics can disciminate all day long and nobody bats an eyelash. So, not only do we not have freedom of speech, but whites are held to very high and unfair standards while other rates don’t seem to be held to any standard.

In China on the other hand, people have big mouths. They make all types of remarks about anything and everything that would be very offensive if translated into English. They just blurt out what they think since nobody is antagonizing them for opening their mouths. The irony behind the iron curtain is that they have more freedom of speech than we do simply because their people are more tolerant than “freedom loving” Americans.

You can say what you like in China — just don’t criticize the government too much or they will strike back.

So, we are fighting for freedom in Iraq when we don’t have freedom here at home. How pathetic. If I decide I want to live in a country with freedom of speech, I’m moving to China.