Achievements: Reduced overtime work, Reduced cost rate and Increased sales

WELLCOMInc. develops the BPO business based in Okinawa prefecture, which has 3 contact centers in Miyakojima, Uruma and Yonago City respectively. As a call center business professional, the company supports the clients to establish their own call centers and optimize their jobs. They also provide their training methods and other possible solutions by using the latest technology. .

Mr. Atsushi Iho
Regional Call Center Manager of WELLCOM Ryukyu Inc.

Reasons to implement BPO services

Shortage of personnel and abandoned calls

We used to operate all call businesses exclusively in 3 in-house contact centers in Miyakojima, Uruma, and Yonago. One of these contact centers operates around the clock but the lack of employees between 8pm to 9am next morning was always an issue. Moreover, many workers are unavailable on weekends and holidays and we constantly faced the shortage of workers at the centers. As a result,we failed to respond all calls and caused inconvenience to our clients in some cases. Then, we consider implementing BPO services to increase response rate by reducing the abandoned calls.

Overtime and poor workforce planning

Reducing overtime and developing strategic workforce planning were also the reasons for introducing BPO services to our company. We used to work overtime to cover the labor shortage, however, we needed an immediate action to minimize the impact of abandoned calls to our clients, thus considered implementing BPO services.

Our BPO partner, Mamasan&Company Inc.,can place operators to the positions in need. For instance, they can assign overseas workers during the night time in Japan to solve the night-labor shortage. Mamasan&Company also gave us a reasonable quote for the services. Prior to implementing BPO services, we calculated overtime labor costs to determine a budget for outsourcing BPO services. Since Mamasan&Company offers high quality and reliable services at reasonable prices, we are happy to work with them as a BPO partner.

Benefits Effect of implementing BPO services

Less overtime work, reduced cost rate and increased sales

Our company’s largest “Work style reform”* is the implementation of BPO services with Mamasan&Company Inc. Before implementing BPO services, we had so much overtime work, as we somehow compensated for remaining tasks by working overtime. After outsourcing BPO services, more management resources were secured with greatly reduced overtime, which made us see the business with much broader perspective. Moreover, we kept enough personnel to assign late night shift and weekends, which reduced the abandoned calls and increased sales. Consequently, we could focus more on business analysis and achieve cost rate reduction.

*“Work style reform” is the reform of Japanese working system for people to be able to work in diverse and flexible ways, so that both people and companies can receive benefits from it such as productivity growth.

Communication challenges and solutions with the teleworkers

Shortly after implementation of BPO services, both the managers and our in-house workers in the contact centers had difficulties adjusting to the new work style. We were unsure how to communicate each other with Mamasan&Company’s staff and it took sometime to figure out how much involvement we could expect from them. Then Mamas proactively made suggestions and took over the tasks, which led the turnover very smoothly. In addition, they shared the purpose and background of tasks and demonstrated motivation and effective communication at work. As a result of working with Mamas, we could compile the procedure in a manual and the business procedure was standardized all through the contact centers. We also utilize employee training videos, which resolved personal dependency at work and achieved effective workforce placement.

Mamasan&Company Inc. is our best BPO service partner.

When choosing our BPO services provider, we knew that Mamasan&Company was the one to work with. With the pandemic of COVID-19, many companies started shifting to teleworking or remote work from that background, we found it very attractive and had great expectations on working with teleworkers and developing work-at-home call center. Shifting to teleworking brings us great benefits, such as reducing center management cost and encouraging employees to chose their own working style. In the future, we will continue evolving by supporting more telework in the company.

Future work style and business reform

We want to take our business to the next level.

We have been implementing BPO services in order to reduce overtime work and increase resources, which made an great impact on our work style reform. We want to learn Mamasan&Company’s teleworking strategies and apply them to our work style reform. In the future, we want to shift to remote work and take our business to the next level.