Innovation for a Changing Customer Service Landscape

When you dream of becoming an entrepreneur, chances are you don’t think of the customer contact center-the industry people complain about with anger and frustration. Who would want to take on the challenge of revolutionizing the call center industry? Only someone with passion, an understanding of the industry, and a vision for success.

Meet TERESA HARTSAW, President and CEO of ePerformax, a customer contact company with its headquarters in Nashville. ePerformax works with Fortune 1000 companies to outsource their customer service support. With over 30 years of experience, Teresa has seen the landscape evolve significantly. Today, customers experience more complex problems and expect higher levels of service.

“People don’t want to call customer support. They’re forced to interact with a robot voice and navigate endless options that often don’t deliver the desired result. By the time they talk to an actual person, they’re frustrated,” Hartsaw says. “The rep wants to do a good job, but without the proper training and motivation, it’s difficult to meet customers’ expectations. In the end, everybody involved is irritated. Companies not only lose employees to burnout and high turnover, but they also lose customers.”

That crossroads between customers’ needs and company solutions is where Hartsaw has made her mark. In 1988, she founded Performance Consulting Group (PCG), and in 2002 PCG partnered with Transnational Diversified Group of the Philippines (TDC) to form ePerformax. Now, the company has four locations and over 6,500 employees. The partnership combines TDG’s expertise in Filipino culture, labor laws, and human resource practices with PCG’s proprietary, award-winning Performance Maximization™ model that is utilized to manage employee performance.

“We’ve all heard how automation and artificial intelligence will replace customer service as we know it today. However, technology alone can’t fix poor customer service. That’s why ePerformax serves its clients by focusing on four other areas of innovation: talent acquisition, training, business analytics, and performance management,” Hartsaw explains.

“First, you have to find the right people, and the Philippines has become a great source for customer service talent,” Hartsaw says. “All of our reps have college degrees and a desire to serve, but we train them on critical thinking, problem-solving, communication, and empathy,” Hartsaw says. “In the past, reps gave mostly scripted responses to customer questions. Today, customers want a rep who is empowered to provide creative solutions, not answers they can read for themselves online.”

Having the right people is only one piece of the puzzle. Understanding what customers really want is the other.

“A company’s customer experiences are a treasure trove of data. We analyze every interaction and prioritize the discoveries that drive the best customer experiences so we can recommend strategic innovations for our clients. Our goal is to create a high-performance, customer-focused organization that is constantly innovating to provide the best service,” Hartsaw says.

“What the data consistently tells us is customers want on-demand access to representatives, who can make solving a problem feel effortless. Technology solutions must incorporate what the customers want, and we must develop representatives who can solve the frustrations that drove the call in the first place. ePerformax empowers clients to make that happen.”

You deserve to work with a call center outsourcing partner that works with you to continuously innovate your customer service experience. Let ePerformax show you how we partner with clients and make your business needs our top priority.

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