Call Center Excellence Through Culture – with Denys Dubner of WOW24-7

In this episode of the Outsource Accelerator Podcast, Derek talks with Denys Dubner, the CEO of WOW24-7, a top-ranking call center services company with offices in Eastern Europe and Latin America. 

They talk about significant concerns in the call center industry, WOW24-7’s notable achievement in terms of agent retention, and insights into Artificial Intelligence (AI).

WOW24-7’s humble beginnings

WOW24-7 started as an internal customer support team in 2008 for multiple IT software product development companies. 

According to Denys, “The name WOW24-7 came at the time when 24-7 was the thing, where everybody wanted to provide 24-7 support.”

In 2016, the company started offering its customer support services to other firms based in the US, Germany, Australia, and Singapore. “We are focusing primarily on e-commerce travel and SaaS…95% of our operations [are] in customer service,” the CEO added. 

At present, WOW24-7 employs over 250 agents spread out across Europe and Latin America, serving customers in ten different languages. 

While most of its customer support representatives work remotely, its middle and top management goes to the office at least once a week. 

Further, WOW24-7 has invested heavily in its systems and data security, so it’s safe to say that the company is “definitely doing fine in this department.”

He is also proud to say that his firm is among the most flexible companies in the industry.

“We typically onboard the client with their own processes. Within the onboarding, we kind of make it gradually better, but [we’re] also investing time and knowledge in the future over time to improve things.”

Major causes of high attrition rate in the call center industry 

Despite WOW24-7 on-going success in the remote work model, there is no denying that it also serves as a big contributor to today’s exceeding employee churn rate. 

This is often due to several factors:

Bad bosses

One of the main reasons why customer support representatives leave is because of poor management. 

Denys explains that “Agent retention rate is one of the key performance indicators we have across all levels from the team leader… the CEO impacts every single department’s ability to perform the work [and] has influence on the agent performance within the BPO.” 

Agent utilization

A lot of businesses, especially tech companies, have been laying off staff due to unforeseen circumstances. Firms are often placed under pressure to maximize the agents they have left. In the end, this causes agents to get overworked and burned out. 

Career advancement 

For many agents, the call center serves as either their first or second job, and they are still in the process of figuring out what they want to do in life. 

As for Denys, “Not everybody wants to stay for long, you know, talking to the difficult customers.” The lack of a clear path towards talent growth and upskilling can push individuals to look for better opportunities elsewhere. 

AI’s role in customer service 

Before wrapping up, Denys concludes that agent turnover rates are consistent across different geographies, indicating a universal challenge. 

Aside from agent retention, Denys admitted that the rise of AI is also an issue. “We are trying to adopt it and it doesn’t work anymore.”

Despite the push towards self-service capabilities, he acknowledges that integration issues between various systems hinder its effectiveness, particularly for smaller organizations lacking seamless data flow between tools. 

This fragmentation necessitates human intervention, undermining the efficiency of AI implementation in contact centers.

Overall, Denys predicts that agents will be safe for the next five to ten years. However, the first line of support will eventually disappear. 

“They will become kind of knowledge management specialists. They will know how to feed the data to the AI systems in the right way and how to structure the data, how to organize it.”

To learn more about WOW24-7 and how it can support your business, head over to its website at: https://wow24-7.io/