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A Case Study: Tacamor - Call Center Outsourcing with SugarCRM

April 14, 2010

Tacamor: Call Center Outsourcing with SugarCRM

Located along the eastern fringes of Canada and within the frigid waters of the North Atlantic, the island of Newfoundland won’t be confused with India as a major outsourcing hotspot anytime soon. But thanks to the development of software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud computing, the concept of locating virtual call centers within the rural bastions of North America has become achievable, and for one SugarCRM customer, a reality.

For Tacamor, a provider of nearshoring call center services based in Newfoundland, the combination of SugarCRM’s open source architecture and on-demand offerings, com­bined with the company’s telephony infrastructure, has proved the perfect fit for operating a low-cost, virtual call center and providing clients worldwide with superior cus­tomer service.

Virtualizing a Rural Call Center

While Newfoundland isn’t considered among the world’s outsourcing hotspots, Tacamor’s CEO Ken Hann underscores the value the region provides in terms of employment and resources. “Rural areas are great for call centers since the population is comprised of well-educated, hard working, friendly, customer service-oriented people,” he says. “People that live in rural areas like the lifestyle and lower costs and want to stay there. We have a loyal and dedicated workforce, so we don’t have the high turnover rates amongst our CSRs like most call centers do.”

The key was arming this dedicated workforce with a new IT infrastructure. Beginning in the spring of 2008, Tacamor went to market to select a new CRM suite solution to replace its existing one, and to find a new telephony product to integrate it with. After considering the results of several RFPs, SugarCRM On-Demand was selected in March as the desktop CRM solution, with ShoreTel providing the back-end IP phone system to handle incoming calls.

To integrate the two, Tacamor turned to Performance Advantage, a Toronto, Canada– based independent consulting firm and SugarCRM partner that among other attributes, specializes in assisting clients with constructing virtual call centers, says Jim Love, a managing partner at Performance Advantage. “The idea of running a virtual call center has been around for a long time, but the technology has only recently existed to do it in a cost-effective manner, opening up those capabilities to SMBs,” he says. “Such was the case with Tacamor.”

This ability would be an important factor with the SugarCRM implementation at Tacamor, because the same rural attributes that enable Newfoundland residents to literally cut across a field to reach Tacamor’s call center can also present challenges in terms of installing and maintaining the center’s infrastructure. As a result, it was imperative that the new CRM solution be easy to install and maintain. “Getting to Newfoundland isn’t the most direct trip in the world,” Love jokes, “but that didn’t prove an issue. We never had a single employee on site. The guys from another vendor kept asking us when we were going to come out. I kept telling them ‘we’re not.’ At first they were skeptical.”

Love may joke about other people’s reaction to running a virtual, Web-based business—but he’s all seriousness when it comes to executing on that vision. “Performance Advantage doesn’t just talk about the advantages of a web based enterprise—we live our vision of the virtual enterprise. And Sugar CRM is a big part of that vision.”

The transition from the previous CRM solution to Sugar was completed in 5 hours, which included rigging the data, converting it for use for Sugar Professional and making the cut over in real time. “We started around midnight and were back up and running by 6 A.M.,” Love says. To connect with their phone system, Love’s team built a custom SOAP interface via SugarCRM’s protocol architecture, allowing incoming calls to automatically populate customer accounts within Sugar Professional.

The Results

Tacamor now has 60 users using Sugar Professional™, serving clients that store customer records ranging from just a few hundred to one client who has tens of thousands. “It’s got to be scalable and it needs to be flexible,” Hann says, referring to any desktop application a CSR would use. “Every client wants to be able to do something different, so as an outsourcer, you need to have something flexible enough to match those needs.”

In addition, Hann says that SugarCRM’s user interface was another benefit. “The product is intuitive. Our CSRs were able to pick it up in just a few days.”

Finally, the minimal strain on infrastructure is another benefit his IT staff has seen. “Access to highly certified IT engineers is limited in a rural area,” he says, “so we needed a solution our small IT staff could maintain. SugarCRM and ShoreTel have provided us with an afford­able, flexible call center infrastructure,” Hann says. “What was once only fair game for enterprises has now become accessible to SMBs thanks to solutions such as these.”

About Tacamor

Tacamor is a nearshore customer service call center deliv­ering great service, reduced costs and increased customer loyalty. Tacamor’s mission is to provide our clients with exceptional call center service that will improve their profit margins by retaining more and happier customers, increas­ing sales and reducing costs.

About Performance Advantage

Performance Advantage is a consulting company based in Toronto, Canada. We focus on helping companies achieve breakthrough levels of corporate performance. That means helping them develop and execute customer focused strategies, supercharging their business processes, devel­oping high performance teams and leveraging information technology.

 
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