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.