double POSITIVE Marketing Group, Inc.

Americans aren’t the only ones fed up with offshore call centers. In “Luring Customers with Local Call Centers,” Newsweek reports that British firms are finding that the cost savings of offshoring are offset by losses in client retention and satisfaction, and companies are moving support operations back home. These firms are making the (wise) assumption that the substantially higher cost of operating domestic call centers will more than pay for itself with better customer satisfaction and retention. The same is true in the U.S., where we’ve also seen many technology and financial services firms pull back from using foreign call centers.

These companies, which are now taking on higher operating costs to help with customer support (and ultimately retention), are beginning to incorporate “domestic call center operations” as a key message in marketing and advertising. And why wouldn’t they do that? After all, this is a move that is good for consumers, right?

But even this commonsensical approach is not without its critics, who “decry these advertising campaigns as xenophobic, saying they play on nationalism and prejudices about call centers in the developing world.” Am I prejudiced because I’m frustrated that many foreign call center agents don’t speak English very well? Or that there is constant latency in the conversation due to VOIP technology? Or that there are very legitimate privacy and fraud concerns that are often associated with foreign call centers?

(Thanks to DoublePositive’s Brad F. for bringing the article to my attention.)

I have always been fascinated how seasonality affects business.  For the most part this is pretty obvious – like the fact that Isotoner probably doesn’t sell as many gloves in the summer as they do in the winter.  Or that Haagen Dazs sells more ice cream in August than it does in February.  But, as a entrepreneur, I am always looking for any possible edge.  Any way that I can predict what is going to happen in the future.  Any way that I can maximize revenue and minimize COGS, even if just for a short period of time.  Seasonality also affects the stock market.  Other examples in the market include well studied seasonalities in sub sectors of the market, such as small cap (the download link is that the bottom) stocks. 

What I really didn’t have a chance to study until we started DoublePositive was how seasonality affects the online marketing business.  Just so we are clear – seasonality is an amazingly influential factor in online marketing.  And, when it comes to live hot transfers, knowing the seasonlities and being able to adjust quickly is one of the great value propositions that we provide to our customer base.  While I can’t give away the secret sauce  I can shed some light on how seasonality affects the live hot transfers business.  Take, for example, the two graphs below.  The one at the top outlines our demand on a daily basis during the winter months.  The one at the bottom outlines our demand on a daily basis during the summer months.

Winter:

vs. Summer:

In the winter months we can see that demand for hot transfers is relatively flat M-TH.  By contrast, in the summertime Mondays and Fridays take a dive and we see greater disparity throughout the week.  We can all certainly understand the ‘Friday effect’ in the summer time, however, I was amazed to see that Monday is a relatively low day as well.  Based on this information, we can infer certain things about our customers and make the necessary adjustments.  What, exactly, those inferences are I shall leave it up to your imagination.

Another way we look for seasonality is on the consumer side.  Intrinsically, we all know its harder to reach consumers in the summer than it is in the winter – they are all on vacation!  But, we have also studied the effects of holidays on consumer contact probabilities.  The effects of religious holidays are different than government holidays which are different based on when during the week the holiday occurred.  All this information is funneled through our DWA to figure out which consumers are the best match for our clients.  The impact of seasonlities are limitless and I could write about this topic forever.  If your interested in discussing how Columbus Day impacts your ability to reach consumers (or any other event for that matter) drop me a line at: s y e d @ d o u b l e p o s i t i v e . c o m

A recent study on call center satisfaction suggests companies may need to move off-shore call centers back to the US to satisfy demanding consumers. Customers polled who thought a call center was located outside the US rated their satisfaction level with the call center experience 26 points lower , and were almost twice as likely to defect , than those who assumed the call center was in the US.

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Workflow is an integral part of what we do at DoublePositive.  In its basic form the DoublePositive workflow consists of taking leads in, processing those leads in a data format, then converting those leads to live hot transfers.  Of course, anyone who has worked in the online marketing space will tell you thats its not simple.  There are tons of regulatory issues that have to be addressed, business rules that have to be adhered to, lead optimization techniques that need to be applied, privacy concerns that need to be taken care of, quality control mechanisms that need to fire, and other various rules, concerns, issues, and processes that need to be applied to each and every single piece of data that comes through our virtual doorstep.  With our philosophy of real time all the time,  a sophisticated, flexible, and scalable workflow architecture is an absolute necessity. 

This week DoublePositive released what ultimately is going to be the pièce de résistance of the DoublePositive technology platform.  Windows Workflow Foundation is an engine that allows organizations with simple or complex workflow based business rules to easily integrate, manage, and modify those workflows and business rules inside of applications.  In this first release of the DoublePositive Workflow Architecture (DWA) the system automates a number of integrations that the business does – to suppliers, clients, and other systems internally.  The DWA has a flexible architecture that allows us to perform any number of industry standard or proprietary data integrations in real time including SMTP integrations, SOAP integrations, and straight HTTP Get or Post integrations among others.  Check back often for more updates to the DWA. 

www.grandcentral.com (acquired by Google for reportedly $50M)

I’ll go on record and emphatically agree that GrandCentral is a brilliant idea, long-overdue, and is extremely-likely to surprass all expectations.

If there is any issue worth addressing, it is that of Caller-ID (vis-a-vis OUTBOUND calls) as opposed to the INBOUND calls the service in its current form supports so well.

Just think about it for a moment…

This is a consumer (to consumer) offering, but a single inbound number is most appealling for advertising purposes.

 Advertising is either Outbound (push) or Inbound (pull).

Caller-ID is a huge advertising channel for C2C.

While GrandCentral is great, I will never be able to take full advantage of the service until Caller-ID numbers are editable via the consumer from any/every outbound number (perhaps the moral equivalent of a “alt” tag in HTML).

Probably the most relevant item to consider about the GrandCentral acquisition is Google’s continued interest in LIVE “voice” traffic, as opposed to just “Internet” traffic.

 DoublePositive knows quite a bit about both “voice” and “Internet” traffic.

SPF

Here at DoublePositive we look to develop a wide range of sophisticated applications that address the business needs of our customer base.  As a result, we have developed a foundation of software applications that have propelled DoublePositive to one of the fastest growing companies in the country.  In the 2+ years that DoublePositive has been around, we have developed applications utilizing Microsoft Sharepoint, Windows Workflow Foundation,  SQL Server 2005, and the .NET Framework.  These applications have a rich user interface that includes the liberal use of Ajax and mashups.  As we continue our explosive growth, I was confronted with how to disseminate information to all the parties that need / like to know about the great things we are doing with our technology.  In that vain, I plan on blogging our Technology updates and learnings.  We are on the cutting edge of using Web 2.0 for daily business and transactional usage.  Understanding how Web 2.0 intersects with business needs is a fascinating concept - one I hope to shed light on by showing how DoublePositive addresses that issue.  Check this blog often to see what we are up.  If you have any questions or would like to know more about what we doing email me at: s y e d @ d o u b l e p o s i t i v e . c o m