How to Train BPO Partners to Integrate with Your Sales Team

Transcript

[00:00:01] Steve MacDonald: Welcome everyone to the Contact Center Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host. Today we have a very interesting guest on, Ken Mogensen. Now Ken, you’re the Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Sneed Coding Solutions, Inc., and as a part of that whole responsibility, you also have the support function that you’re in charge of.

[00:00:19] Steve MacDonald: We’re going to be talking today about how we’re working with our BPO partners and how important that is, to the point where you actually work with BPO partners as their frontline sales in a lot of the territories that you’re operating within. That’s a lot of trust. That’s a huge partnership.

[00:00:35] Steve MacDonald: That’s levels away from the traditional ways that the industry still thinks about customer support and BPO services as a low cost being the number one thing, right? But you have to trust somebody if they’re going to be doing sales for you, and such an important part of the customer support operations.

[00:00:54] Steve MacDonald: That’s what we’re going to be talking about. But I’d love to know a little bit more about you. Just in our conversations, I’ve learned some really interesting things, that you’re actually Danish and you just recently got your dual citizenship, so congratulations on that. I’d love to know a little bit more about your background.

[00:01:11] Steve MacDonald: Professional, personal, you’ve got an F1 racing interest in mind. I’d love to know more before we dive in; could you please take a minute or two to share your background?

[00:01:22] Ken Mogensen: Sure, Steve. Appreciate it. First of all, I want to thank you for inviting me and finding me to be interesting. It’s always, I think, a bit of a compliment that somebody thinks you’re interesting enough to bring on their podcast and have you fill in time and have their audience listen to you. So thank you for having me. And yeah, like you said, I am Danish by birth. I was born in Denmark. My family moved to Texas when I was rather young. I think I was in kindergarten. I was five years old when we moved here. I’ve basically lived in the Houston, Texas area my whole life ever since.

[00:01:50] Ken Mogensen: Folks have jokingly told me in the past that I’m not really Danish anymore because I’ve lived here longer than I actually lived in Denmark. Jokingly, I used to always say my green card begs to differ. Although, like you said, that was only until about six weeks ago. I’m six weeks into my US citizenship.

[00:02:05] Ken Mogensen: So, very grateful. It was a little bit of a humbling moment for me going to the citizenship ceremony. I’m a little bit of a cynic or pessimist in my personality. Going into the ceremony I was scoffing. They’re saying this is a big deal for a lot of people, and initially I was thinking this is just paperwork for me.

[00:02:24] Ken Mogensen: I was just filing. My green card is expiring. I need to get this taken care of. But no, sitting there in that ceremony, I think they said there were about 1,500 green card holders and immigrants there as part of that ceremony that were sworn in that day. I think they said over 150 countries were represented there that were getting their citizenship. Wide range of stories, wide range of ages. A lot of service members that had served in the military for the United States that were getting their citizenship.

[00:02:54] Ken Mogensen: And folks that were in their seventies or eighties that had been here for a long time and were finally checking that box off. In that moment, it finally actually did just hit me and I had this kind of a highlight reel going through my head as I was sitting there just thinking about the last, oh gosh, what is it now? ’91, ’92, moved here. Thirty-some-odd years of memories. You just have these flashback moments and think about my parents. They were in their mid to late twenties when they made the decision, career change, to up and move to an entirely different country. So just an overwhelming moment of emotion as you’re riding through and thinking about these things.

[00:03:32] Ken Mogensen: And I have my own children now that were born in this country, now with a Danish heritage. Second or third generation, however you want to qualify that. So that was a pretty neat experience and definitely, I guess what I’m getting at, something that caught me off guard at how emotional it ended up being, because going into it, it was not something that I was treating with a lot of emotions.

[00:03:49] Steve MacDonald: There’s a lot of us that just take it for granted, our citizenship and the rights that we have and the opportunities that we have. That’s so incredible to hear. What I would love to do is take that passion that you just talked about, because I heard that when you and I had our previous conversations preparing for the podcast, and how you bring that into the business world, and how you treat partners, how you treat people on your team. So I’d love to start out, because you had a way of dealing with BPO partners, and it’s such an important part of the business, because we can’t be everywhere all the time.

[00:04:20] Steve MacDonald: But we need people that we trust. We need people that we can trust in the relationship with the most important assets that we have as a company, which is the relationships we have with our customers. You talked about treating your BPO partner as a direct report, and I wanted to uncover that and understand more about what you meant there.

[00:04:42] Ken Mogensen: Sure, and I think that ultimately actually maybe comes from my boss, our CEO, founder, and owner Brian Sneed. When he looks at our org chart, first and foremost, we’re a small company. We have a global reach. We have subsidiaries in UK, Australia, now Mexico. We just soft-launched in Mexico and are getting ready to launch in the European Union. The big part of BPO for us was as we looked at our global scale in terms of coverage.

[00:05:08] Ken Mogensen: What are our options and how do we cover the Australian time zone? We’re a small team. We’re 12 employees here in Spring, Texas, just north of Houston. So how do you cover those time zones and make sure that we’re looking to replicate our business model in the US into these new markets that we’re entering?

[00:05:25] Ken Mogensen: How do you do that at scale? Entering these markets as a startup, every dollar spent is a matter of efficiency and ROI. Where’s the best spend on this dollar and how do you get the best coverage?

[00:05:37] Ken Mogensen: So to tie this back to your original question, I know I’m rambling a little bit. When the owner looks at our org chart, I think there’s something out there that says any given manager or VP or leader should never have more than, I think, five to seven direct reports.

[00:05:51] Ken Mogensen: And then they max out in terms of productivity. So when he looks at the org chart, he counts our BPO that we utilize for our customer service, sales inquiries, for the phones and chats. He looks at that team as basically one direct report. Now there’s a team of agents there, but I have one point of contact that oversees that team.

[00:06:11] Ken Mogensen: So when he looks at the org chart, aside from my direct marketing reports and our internal salespeople, that BPO organization is basically lumped in, in his view, as a direct report. Their performance is a direct reflection on my performance and ultimately the company performance. Hopefully that was a roundabout way of answering your question.

[00:06:32] Steve MacDonald: Yeah, I love that because we treat outside organizations like, sometimes we can point the finger and say, yeah, these guys aren’t working out or this is a problem area. But when you are looking at that as a reflection of you and your performance, ultimately the CEO of your company is going to look at you and he’s going to say, Ken, how is the job getting done? Are we doing what we need to do? And so you look at it that way.

[00:07:00] Steve MacDonald: It’s vital, that relationship. So one of the kinds of things that you even think about, knowing that kind of context and that kind of importance, how do you vet a BPO partner?

[00:07:09] Steve MacDonald: What are the things or the criteria of what you think is important to get a new BPO partner in to do that kind of a job?

[00:07:17] Ken Mogensen: Vetting the partner, finding the right partner. Like I said, we must have been on the right one, because it’s lasted this long. And so what you’re looking for is, you need to, how do they train, how do they disseminate your information and your product information, your policies, procedures, different things? How do they go about imparting that information upon the team that’s gonna be working for you? And then in terms of how do they train, does that align with how you train and is there any flexibility there? So with our product line, our market, our customer profile, it’s a little bit niche. It’s also, it’s B2B and not B2C. I think that’s an important difference there in terms of how you manage those relationships or how you communicate with the customers ultimately, because

[00:08:00] Ken Mogensen: you’re talking about people that are dealing with bottom lines. They’re not necessarily dealing with, oh, my TV is not working right now and I can’t watch my favorite podcast. You’re dealing with a production line manager whose equipment is down and he needs a solution because he’s losing $5,000 an hour. And the operations manager is beating down his throat. Making sure that there’s a good understanding of that profile, that the BPO partner that you’re choosing is comfortable dealing in, delving into that realm. A lot of contact centers, a lot of phone center-type stuff, is probably, I think most people think about if they, it’s B2C. Having a full understanding for how they train their agents, and then the flexibility of how they train. And getting back into how niche our product lens is. Not just the personality profile of how you talk to them, but also our specific products. It’s not a cell phone, it’s not a B2C product, it’s not a TV. It’s very unique equipment that has very specific parameters around how it operates, what it will do, what it won’t do.

[00:08:57] Ken Mogensen: So, we really need these agents to be able to have a good understanding, comprehension around those. The types of phone calls that they’re fielding or getting are gonna be questions from a production line manager at some kind of a food production company that’s, hey, I need this piece of equipment for my factory and I need it to be able to do this, that, A, B, and C. Can yours do A, B, and C?

[00:09:19] Ken Mogensen: So, that training is just so crucial. And what we ended up doing was being, doing a hybrid, a little bit of where typically our partner, their default would be to retrain the trainer, and then they have their trainer do their internal training. We did a combination of that.

[00:09:36] Ken Mogensen: I did some initial training with that person, but also did the group training. And I think that’s important because in terms of any kind of questions that come up, it’s really important that I can do my best to train their trainer, but they’re gonna have some questions that are probably only I’m gonna be able to answer.

[00:09:51] Ken Mogensen: So them allowing me to take part in that training of their team definitely was a huge thing. And then role-playing. This was really just overall, our partner just has a great QA process in place. Not only for their training, but also how they monitor their KPIs moving forward. You want a partner that’s willing to accept your KPIs, without a doubt. Because if they have their own, if they can’t bridge their QA processes with what you’re measuring, I think that’s an automatic,

[00:10:17] Ken Mogensen: this isn’t gonna work. Understanding how they ensure their quality, how regularly are they auditing their agents, and then ongoing training, how do you do ongoing training? We recently identified the fact that there was some gap. It’s just been a while since we touched on some products.

[00:10:32] Ken Mogensen: And so there was a little bit of, yeah, just a few product information items that just needed to be reiterated and do some retraining. But having a proactive partner that, when you’re reporting issues that you’re seeing or reviewing quality or I don’t know if I like this response or that response, we need to be better here,

[00:10:48] Ken Mogensen: and then having them, that partner, having their own systems in place for how to address those, and then how to take corrective measures and corrective actions. And then also, their structure and organization is quite crucial.

[00:10:59] Ken Mogensen: So the way that they’re set up is, we have a team of agents that cover for us 24 hours a day. So our internal team covers our business hours. And then anything outside of business hours, Saturday, Sunday, our BPO handles that for us. So they have a team that basically are on shifts, that rotate so that they can cover that 24-hour span. And then they have a team leader that is our primary point of contact, that is responsible for dispersing. As opposed to like, now I gotta keep six people in mind, how do I communicate with six people? How do I train six people? No. I just have one point of contact.

[00:11:31] Ken Mogensen: And then they’re running that team internally. And then not only do they have a team lead, they also have a performance analyst or a QA person. I don’t know, I’m not quite sure what the, but it’s literally going in on a monthly basis and doing random audits of phone calls and random audits of chat. And the grading rubric that they have in place for how they grade,

[00:11:48] Ken Mogensen: not only their grade protocols, they grade grammar, they grade linguistics. Because we’re dealing with an international team of agents that are responding to native English speakers, so we wanna make sure that they’re speaking very clear English.

[00:12:01] Ken Mogensen: So there’s just a very, like, the grading rubric reminds me of being in college. They send it to me on a monthly basis, here’s the scores, and here’s what we’ve identified. I’ve jokingly shown it to my internal sales team. And they do a great job, not trying to say they don’t, but I jokingly tell them, watch out or I’m gonna start grading you guys like our BPO grades their agents.

[00:12:20] Ken Mogensen: And I’ll be, see, it’d be curious to see how, if I did an audit once they do their audits, if, what kind of score you guys get. So, there’s a lot there. But yeah, it’s just getting a full understanding of how they train and then how they maintain that knowledge base, and then continually grow that knowledge base.

[00:12:37] Ken Mogensen: So they, and then monitor how that is translated into actual performance or conversations with your potential customers or even existing customers.

[00:12:46] Steve MacDonald: I love that you focus right out of the bat on agent training. And in the age and day of AI, where the easier conversations and questions are gonna be handled and the agents are more and more turning into consultants really. Where they have to have a higher level of understanding and be able to have not only the knowledge of the product, but the knowledge of the industry. And be able to reassure, play that sales role. That’s a heavy lift. The question really is, it’s not just training, and you gave us some of the secret sauce here, but you are training as if they were an internal sales department in a lot of respects.

[00:13:28] Steve MacDonald: So I’d just love to know some of your secret sauce around that and how you do that.

[00:13:33] Ken Mogensen: Yeah, I can’t even claim to have the secret sauce. Honestly, it’s our partner that really had a really firm structure in place. The organization level, their responsiveness and everything is just really, is just spot on.

[00:13:45] Ken Mogensen: And I can’t even claim to take too much credit for that, other than finding them and then making the decision to go with them. I’ll take all the credit there. And one other thing, this is something that’s hit me recently, and I guess this was something I did during the vetting process without really realizing I was doing it.

[00:14:01] Ken Mogensen: So I mentioned to you during our pre-call here before we started recording, our company runs on EOS. It’s the Entrepreneurial Operating System. It’s basically the way I describe it, it’s like a Windows OS but for your business. You think about the resource management or how your operating system runs your computer, that’s what this does for your business.

[00:14:20] Ken Mogensen: I’m reading this book by the founder, creator, this gentleman by the name of Gino Wickman. He wrote a book, he’s written several books, but one of them is called EOS Life. It just expands upon the EOS principles. One of the things he talks about in there is not just applying EOS core values. This is what I’m getting at. Core values fit.

[00:14:39] Ken Mogensen: We talk a lot about that within our organization, within our business. When we hire people or we’re looking for people, it’s not just the skillset for the position. Another critical component is, are they a core values fit? We have our six identified core values for our company, and we look at any potential new hire. Do they have, not necessarily all of them, but do they have most—more than half—of these core values? Are they going to be a fit in our culture? One thing I can say is that, as I’m reading this book and thinking about it, and I’m thinking about our partner, it’s like, they are a core values fit for us.

[00:15:15] Ken Mogensen: Committed to customer success. That’s my personal favorite core value because our success as a company and our growth is entirely contingent upon our customers growing and our customers being successful. Our solutions and our equipment need to provide them what they need in terms of efficiency or solutions, whatever it is, in order to grow their business.

[00:15:35] Ken Mogensen: So as they grow their business, we grow with them. And our business partner definitely has that same belief—not only that they believe in our success, so they champion our success by helping us be successful—but also they’re championing our customer’s success. It’s almost like a two-way. They’re taking that all the way down to that level.

[00:15:54] Ken Mogensen: And then in terms of positive attitude and culture, integrity and fairness, taking pride and never settle, constant aim for improvement—all of these things, these are some of our core values. Our business partner checks the box on a lot of those.

[00:16:08] Ken Mogensen: That’s a really big thing too. Even if you find—my ultimate point is—even if you find somebody and you think, wow, their training is great and their QA is great and they have all these great reviews, try to think about, if you don’t have your defined core values maybe written down, what your company emphasizes or prioritizes.

[00:16:27] Ken Mogensen: Try to think about that as you’re vetting or evaluating potential vendors or partners to work with. Do they champion and believe in the same core tenets and core values that you do? If they don’t, then maybe, it’s not everybody and that’s okay.

[00:16:44] Ken Mogensen: It doesn’t make them a bad person. They’re just maybe not the right fit for you. It’s about finding that right fit. Because the last thing you want to do—and this again is where I feel so grateful—is that we made the right partner choice. We found the right partner. We’re in our third year or so now, and sure, there’s been hiccups, and that’s okay. Nobody’s perfect. Even my internal sales team, sometimes they make a misstep or whatever. Then it’s just a matter of, okay, this is a learning moment, this is how we handle it, and we move on from there.

[00:17:12] Ken Mogensen: So even though you want to make sure that not only do they have their ducks in a row organizationally, in the way they control their quality and training, but are they that core values fit? Do they value the same things that you do?

[00:17:24] Ken Mogensen: If that matches up, then you don’t have to—last thing you want is, oh yeah, these guys seem great. They have five-star reviews, customer referrals, success stories, everything looks great. Then it turns out six months down the road there’s a misfit there because there’s a misalignment on core values for whatever reason.

[00:17:43] Ken Mogensen: Then you have to go through that process all over. You’ve lost six months’ worth of productivity, and you don’t have any kind of efficiency.

[00:17:50] Ken Mogensen: You want an organization that is going to be able to embody your core values because they are, as far as your customer’s concerned, when they’re calling your 1-800 number or they’re getting on your website or on that chat—they don’t know they’re talking to a BPO.

[00:18:05] Ken Mogensen: They don’t know that they’re talking to an outsourced agent. In their mind’s eye, they’re talking to your company. They’re talking to a representative for your company. So you better be sure that person, or whoever is on the other end of that, understands what your company is and what your company stands for.

[00:18:19] Steve MacDonald: There’s a lot of what you’re talking about here that feels like—it’s—we talk a lot in the industry about cultural fit. They have to have the right cultural fit. And core value is a huge part of that. Another big part, though, is—you talked about it earlier—in terms of them having the flexibility to set goals. They’ll have their KPIs and their way of tracking, but be open and willing to look at how you want to look at the business and how you want to track KPIs. That lack of flexibility sometimes is what the BPO industry is known for. How important was that part of the decision-making?

[00:19:01] Steve MacDonald: The way that you judge and evaluate?

[00:19:03] Ken Mogensen: Absolutely critical, of course. Because at the end of the day, we have a couple—we have a few—it’s not even that many. I don’t think they’re unreasonable. And honestly, the KPIs that our partner has, they measure the data points. They measure more things than we do.

[00:19:16] Ken Mogensen: So that was kind of a green light, a green flag, so to speak. The level at which they track things is very detailed. That attention to detail was very reassuring. Just being able to say, okay, these are the metrics that are really important to us.

[00:19:30] Ken Mogensen: All of your metrics are also important and those are great. It’s really good to have that visibility. But we also need to make sure that we have this—ultimately these particular benchmarks right here, KPIs or data points—that’s how we look at you as a partner. Whether or not you meet these goals.

[00:19:45] Ken Mogensen: These are the KPIs that we judge our own internal salespeople on, our own inbound sales team. They’re measured against these KPIs. So these are the standards that we judge them by. These are the same standards we’re going to judge you by. If you can’t accept that, then again, that’s—you know—well, it was nice having a conversation with you.

[00:20:01] Ken Mogensen: I just don’t think we’re going to end up being a good fit. So thankfully again—I’ve said it a couple of times now—but we were able to find that good fit.

[00:20:09] Steve MacDonald: Part of that fit, I want to ask you a question on. There was a woman, Chief Customer Officer—really bright lady—and she said, working with a BPO partner, they’re having so many interactions with our customers, I need to learn.

[00:20:21] Steve MacDonald: One of the number one KPIs, she said, is I want them to make me smarter. I want to know more about my customers. I want to learn. How important is that in a BPO partner—that you’re constantly learning from them as a reflection of all the conversations that they’re having with your customers?

[00:20:39] Ken Mogensen: No. Yeah, a two-way communication is definitely important. Having that two-way channel open to be able to, it can’t just be top down. If you have your direct reports on your team, you can’t just have a top-down approach. At the end of the day, all of my employees and our company’s employees, regardless if they’re in order fulfillment or if they’re in sales or tech support, they sit in that

[00:21:00] Ken Mogensen: seat and they own that seat, and nobody knows that seat like the person that sits in that seat. And that’s a fundamental part of the EOS philosophy. And that’s what I always try to encourage my team members to do—take ownership of your seat as if it’s your business within the business. And the only way I can allow that to happen is to delegate and allow them to have the ability to make suggestions for improvement or process improvements or whatever that may be. You can’t just say, oh, I know best, I sit up here on the top of my hill and I know the best way to do this because this is the way I did it when I did it, and this is the only way to do it, and we will always do it my way. You gotta be able to, whether it’s your own direct report or your BPO partner, to be able to have that collaborative discussion and get some feedback to say, hey, you know what,

[00:21:45] Ken Mogensen: I know this is maybe the way that the company originally set the SOP, but I don’t think it’s working anymore, and here’s why it’s not working. Maybe we need to have a conversation around how we change this or modify it. So that’s a conversation that we’re always trying to encourage

[00:22:00] Ken Mogensen: internally. But definitely, you also have to be, you have to give your BPO partner that same avenue.

[00:22:07] Ken Mogensen: You have to treat it with mutual respect. At the end of the day, your BPO partner, you’re an expert on your product, you’re an expert on your market, you’re an expert on your customer, and your BPO may not, because they’re an expert in BPO, they’re an expert in call centers, they’re an expert in how to do these types of things. 

[00:22:20] Ken Mogensen: So allow them to voice their expertise and share their expertise with you as opposed to having your head in the sand and saying, no, this is the only way my company wants to do it. But maybe there might be a better way out there of doing it. And maybe, ultimately, if you have that kind of approach to your business partner, it, again, it comes back to what we started this conversation with, Steve, about treating them as if they’re your employee.

[00:22:47] Ken Mogensen: You want to give them the same level of respect and opportunity to own that seat as you would your own employee and have that feedback opportunity so that you can continue. That’s the only way that the partnership continues to grow and flourish and evolve and become stronger and better over time.

[00:23:04] Steve MacDonald: We’ve covered so much territory here, and our human brains can only remember one or two or three things max at a time. If you had one takeaway that you wanted the audience or other CX leaders here to have, to take away from our conversation today, what would that one takeaway be?

[00:23:23] Ken Mogensen: That’s a big ask, Steve. Maybe it’s just ’cause it’s what’s fresh in my mind right now. I spent a good amount of time talking about that core values thing. But really, ultimately, I think that it’s not just this book I just read. Like you said, there’s a lot of talk around it, on the LinkedIn world and out in the business world about culture fit.

[00:23:41] Ken Mogensen: And Mark Cuban has talked about it recently a lot, and other well-respected business leaders talk about how important culture fit is when you’re hiring. Of course, depending on the position, skill set is important. But also, even then, like you can, like Mark Cuban, I think he’s the one that made this point, you can teach skills, you can teach the ability to do stuff, but you can’t teach a culture fit.

[00:24:04] Ken Mogensen: You can’t put a round peg in a square hole, to use an old tired cliché. So ultimately, I think that almost needs to be at the very top of the priority list in terms of when you look for a partner. Is culture and core values fit there?

[00:24:18] Ken Mogensen: Because at the end of the day, there are multiple BPO partners out there. There’s a lot of partners you can find, and there’s lots of very high-quality partners out there. So you’re gonna find one that has a culture fit, and you’re gonna be able to find one that also has the skill set and is able to deliver for you.

[00:24:32] Ken Mogensen: But I would just say, you can’t teach, you can’t force culture, you can’t force that core values fit. So I would really, again, maybe it’s just ’cause that’s what’s fresh on my mind right now. That’s a lot of what’s been on my mind. So that’s influencing my answer to your question.

[00:24:45] Ken Mogensen: But I do believe that is just something that you really have to, you can’t, even if it’s not the most important thing to you, you definitely can’t ignore it. It has to be part of your process.

[00:24:57] Steve MacDonald: I love it. The mission of this podcast is to bring executives like yourself together, and we all have our own unique perspectives and insights and background and what’s worked and what hasn’t, what we had to retry and who we’re working with.

[00:25:09] Steve MacDonald: But if we can bring it all together and we can share what’s worked, then that’s the rising tide that lifts all boats. And that’s the mission of the podcast. It’s how do we each share so that we can make all of us more successful, and I think you’ve just done a fantastic job of that today. I just wanted to say thank you for coming on.

[00:25:26] Ken Mogensen: Yeah, absolutely, Steve. Again, like I said at the beginning, I was humbled too. I know it took us a while to finally get on camera. We had our preliminary meeting a few months back, dare I say, almost a year ago. So thank you for staying on me. Again, you think I’m worthy of talking to and sharing with the audience. So thank you.