Telnet is a privately owned outsourcing call centre. They provide both in and outbound calling for complaints, support and sales campaigns. They have been a client of Alpha since late 2016 and in mid 2017, after winning additional campaign work for several of their clients, they came to the Alpha group of companies to find additional qualified temporary staff to work on these campaigns.
In May 2017 Telnet were looking for additional outbound call centre staff. The numbers were based on the requirements of several different campaigns. The numbers peaked at 30 by mid 2018, mostly as a result of the work that Telnet won supporting NZ Stats and the census. Sourcing and managing the temporary staff needed was given exclusively to Alpha as a result of relationships and work that we had previously performed within the organization.
From a relatively small beginning we rapidly built the numbers of outbound call centre staff for Telnet between May and August of 2017. Many of these staff were remote workers, ie they had a home office with good internet connection and were sourced, onboarded and managed remotely. They continued to work on campaigns into 2018 and then Telnet approached Alpha for an additional 12 staff to with different language abilities to cover the 2018 census. This work continued into late 2018. We still have temporary staff working at Telnet and several others have been taken on permanently by Telnet.
The main challenge with this client was finding enough experienced outbound call centre staff to man the campaigns that were being won by Telnet. In particular the client was looking for at least three to four years prior experience working in telesales or a similar sales environment, and preference was originally given to those who could show that they were able to work effectively from home.
The NZ Census work was different in that this was inbound calling, mostly from people who had queries on the way that they could use the technology component of answering the census. Alpha provided temporary staff who:
The timelines we received from Telnet were typically very short – in most cases campaigns would be sold and the expectation was that these were fully manned within two weeks.
Due to the nature of campaigns some of the work was relatively short term and it wasn’t possible to give our temporary staff an indication that they would have additional assignments after the specific assignment that they were originally assigned to. On the other hand the client wanted to know that the people they had spent some time training would remain available. We found the key to bridging two competing realities was constant communication with both the temp and the client.
Our consulting and temporary staff have worked with Telnet now for nearly three years. Our numbers have reduced in recent times as campaigns have come and gone however we have had very good to excellent feedback on our temporary staff, and a commitment from the client that they will continue to give us first call on any resource requirements that they can’t fill themselves.
