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PodOne

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PodOne

PodOne is a decentralized contact center network that connects businesses together. Through PodOne, a business can take advantage of human resources leased to it from throughout the network in order to acquire the personnel necessary to handle customer interactions.

Some of the biggest challenges faced by contact centers include exorbitant operating and capital technology expenditures; a demanding labor force with costly recruiting, training and recognition programs, yet unusually high attrition; lackluster customer experiences and low satisfaction, as measured by customer satisfaction (CSAT), customer dissatisfaction (DSAT), and net promoter scores (NPS); as well as service level challenges measured via three key industry performance indicators: first call resolution (FCR), average speed of answer (ASA), and average handle time (AHT).

The award-winning team behind PodOne has spent the last 15 years in the contact center industry working on solving some of the industry’s technical challenges and ever-increasing costs, with a high degree of success. With PodOne, they are embarking on a journey to address the labor issues of the industry by creating a decentralized platform for training, resource sharing, and automatic payment distribution.

The PodOne network solves two significant labor force problems affecting contact centers today. The first problem is the issue of excess capacity (payrolled, non-billable time) in the form of agent idle time. Contact centers often pay hourly for representatives who are simply idle while waiting to handle customer interactions. According to Aberdeen, agents spend approximately 25% of their time in an idle state. In a standard 8-hour shift, this results in a loss of 2 hours per work day or 10 hours per 5-day work week simply due to idle time. With an agent pay rate of $10.50 per hour, at a 100-agent contact center, this results in approximately $546,000 lost to idle time per year. As can be seen, this amounts to serious losses that could be better spent creating more value.

The second problem solved by the PodOne network is the problem of insufficient staffing for peak seasons. During peak seasons, the volume of interactions spikes and it becomes a hassle for a contact center to procure the necessary staff to handle the increased volume effectively.

According to emarketer.com, US retail ecommerce sales increased by 17.8% during the 2016 holiday shopping season. An increase in sales typically means an increase in call volumes at contact centers as customers reach support for various purchase-related issues. This leaves contact centers with the challenge of efficient hiring and scheduling for a busy season, while attempting to minimize their customer abandonment rate.

Idle Time Resource Pool

At a contact center, oftentimes a representative is idle while he or she is waiting to handle customer interactions, typically due to lower-than-expected call volumes rather than a fault of their own. The employer pays for this lapse in productivity, especially if the representative is paid by the hour. With PodOne, an employer can auction its employees’ idle time to other businesses and individuals on the network in need of additional human resources to complete tasks. An employer leasing out its own surplus human resources to other businesses is paid for doing so, thus keeping its workforce productive while generating additional value even during moments of idleness, solving the first problem discussed earlier. This system creates a pool of available representatives and a marketplace for their idle time for use by businesses in need of additional staffing.

Elastic Staffing

During a business’s peak seasons, contact centers are faced with the task and challenges of building an efficiently-sized staff necessary to handle the increase in interaction volume. A contact center typically begins a lengthy process to acquire the necessary staff. First, the contact center must analyze past years and predict the number of representatives needed during the peak season. For sophisticated contact center operations, this process is typically performed using advanced workforce management software while less sophisticated centers rely on manual entries from old Excel spreadsheets. Then, the contact center recruits staff utilizing either its own human resources department, or a recruiting/staffing agency. Should the contact center decide to hire a recruiting agency to meet its staffing needs, it would need to provide supporting information including the total number of representatives required, language proficiency requirements, skillsets, experience requirements, background check requirements, a budget per representative, and a desired schedule. After a cumbersome negotiation period, the staffing agency then sends potential recruits to the contact center, which then vets and trains the potential recruits according to its own practices.

It is the PodOne network’s pool of human resources which solves the problem of short-staffing during peak seasons. Contact centers are able to access the network of representatives whose idle times have been marked as available, and make a request for personnel which includes all the requirements for the position. Payment, vetting, and training are all performed automatically by different aspects of the system, requiring the contact center manager only to listen to the provided voice samples of potential recruits and to select which recruits shall be hired. This cuts out the recruiting agency middle-man completely, saving the contact center time and money.

The PodOne network creates a decentralized market of talent and a shared pool of human resources allowing for greater productivity and an increase in value produced by businesses.

Team

Marlon Williams

Chief Executive Officer

Colin Stansfield

Chief Software Architect

Charles Callari

Chief Operations Officer

Judson Noel

Customer Success Chief

Anthony Rossello

unior Software Developer

Morgan James

Marketing Manager

PodOne Advisors

Warren Whitlock

Rob Duncan

Milestones