For Alec Brecker, president and CEO of The Results Companies, success isn’t only measured in metrics and dollars. As he’s guided the Florida-based call-center company from an outbound service model to an inbound-call system, Brecker has kept his focus on the cogs that keep the machine running—happy employees and happy customers.
The Results Companies was founded in 1990 as an organization where outbound dialers acted as salespeople for products. This model provided a great foundation for sales operations, understanding how to segment and manage employees and establishing proper customer interaction. This lasted until the early 2000s, when the company shifted to a new telemarketing model to stay up-to-date with advances in the industry.
Brecker stepped in around 2006, as the world of telemarketing was starting to face systemic challenges. Legislation that enforced the National Do Not Call Registry had recently come into play, forcing the company to evaluate its existing structure and adapt to new ways of engaging customers. Brecker says at that point in time, the company needed to “think about how to retool the entire organization around becoming a customer-experience company.” With more than eighteen years of experience in the outsourcing industry, Brecker was just the man for the job.
Now, the company provides contact-center customer service, sales, and retention solutions to Fortune 500 companies across various industries, but there were several crucial pivot points that occurred to help the company get there. First, one of the biggest challenges that needed to be addressed was the number and size of locations needed to get the work done. In 2006, the company employed approximately 1,000 employees, with twenty (significantly smaller) domestic locations. Now, eighteen sites in four countries house almost 10,000 employees.
With that increased number of employees, the most crucial development has been making sure the right people are hired and developed to get the job done correctly—one of Brecker’s main responsibilities. “I think about call centers as related to manufacturing and assembly lines,” he says. “Our resource is people, so we focus on retention and finding ways to keep tenure going up when we are growing as a company.”
The company uses an operating model called CX360 to help select appropriate people for specific jobs, track performance, match training partnerships, and record data that follows each employee over time to monitor performance. In addition, each supervisor or team leader oversees an average of fifteen direct reports, managing day-to-day operations, keeping motivation high, monitoring growth and progress, and making sure each employee is interacting with customers in a satisfactory manner.
These methods not only help retain a trustworthy employee base, but also help improve the customer experience, which is one of the company’s primary goals, Brecker says. “Most of the time, customers are calling because they have a challenge or something is wrong and there is going to be lots of negativity there,” Brecker says. “With real-time training and feedback, we’re better at empowering our front-line workforce to make decisions that will directly influence one customer at a time.”
As interactivity between customer and company becomes more technology-driven and more “real time,” as Brecker says, customer experience is more important than ever to keep levels of retention and satisfaction high. Regardless of where technologies lead the industry, people will always be needed to manage these systems, Brecker says. “When you think about what customers want and how much technology has created automation, you’re always going to need people to communicate with people,” he says. “At least in my foreseeable lifetime; I don’t see that going away.”
So as long as he keeps building on the employee management systems The Results Companies has established, Brecker believes the company will continue to serve callers, maximize interactions, and support a sense of customer experience well into the future. “The evolution of the company is about the great people that work here,” he says. “That makes it easy for us as leaders to grow.”
For over twenty years, Interior Concepts has been an integral partner for thousands of contact-center and customer-service organizations. We are proud to have been selected by The Results Companies as their furniture partner of choice for their customer-service and sales-solutions teams across the United States.
