Success Stories

Envision EMI delivers a wide range of career exploration and leadership development programs to elementary, middle, high school, and college students.  These programs are located at top colleges across the country and are taught by subject matter experts with customized curriculum designed for each program.  Envision’s Office of Admissions historically has consisted of a combination of in-house and third-party call centers located in the mid-west and mid-Atlantic regions.

Envision engaged with Call Center Optimization Group (CCOG) in 2017 to evaluate the call center’s overall performance.  Envision had leveraged a couple different third-party vendors in recent years in addition to a small in-house team to deliver their call center sales and support but were not seeing the results they wanted.  Employee performance was inconsistent, attrition was higher than industry averages, and sales targets were not being met.  CCOG was initially tasked to create a playbook for the organization to identify how to improve the overall performance of the internal call center.  The process involved evaluating communication flow between marketing and Ops as well as assessing the existing workforce to ensure the human capital was aligned to optimize performance.  Building the playbook involved interviewing people throughout the organization, reviewing the existing technology stack to ensure data flow and integrity, and numerous other milestone reviews with management.

There were several recommendations coming out of the playbook analysis which were presented to Envision:

Organizational Structure: The Call Center at Envision did not have the right organizational structure.  We performed a deep dive assessment and made a number of recommendations which Envision completely adopted.  Most notably, Envision did not have the right Operations Leader running the contact center and we recommended a change.  CCOG assisted in the recruiting, vetting, and interviewing of the new Director of Sales who began in 2018.  She helped drive the transformation of the internal sales team to consistently outperform Envision’s 3^rd party providers.  So much so, that Envision decided to bring the entire sales process in-house in 2020.  Her success led to her promotion as a VP of Operations for the parent company (WorldStrides).

Operational Environment: Envision needed to create a successful contact center environment to improve sales.  The in-house agents were on a different floor than the rest of the organization in a space which was not designed to be a contact center.  CCOG recommended changing the layout of the workspace, creating a traditional open sales floor with more energy, transparency, and accountability than the previous fragmented workspace which was dark and depressing.  We also suggested adding new computers and headsets for agents to facilitate a more streamlined interaction with customers and a better voice quality experience.  At the same time the floor was configured with future growth in mind as the performance metrics indicated growing the in-house team would lead to more sales.  This recommendation was followed by Envision and had an immediate positive impact on morale and sales.

Sales Goals: Envision’s agent incentive structure did not account for the tremendous seasonality of the sales cycle.  This resulted in agents being overcompensated for meeting and exceeding sales goals during traditionally high transaction months and being penalized for months where transactions were slow.  This led to Envision overcompensating poor performance is the busy months and losing agents to attrition in the slow months.  CCOG worked with Envision to analyze historical sales trends and assign variable goals based on month.  This had the benefit of ensuring agents had achievable goals every month and ultimately was part of the strategy that drove a 10% increase in sales conversion.

3^rd Party Contract Negotiations: Envision had already chosen a new third-party call center vendor prior to engaging CCOG.  CCOG was able to significantly help in the contract negotiation most notably by tying Envisions sales conversion goals to variable pricing vs. the flat production rate per hour pricing that the vendor initially proposed.  These goals were backed by historical numbers at both the internal site and previous external vendor which made the negotiation less complex. Ultimately, the vendor never consistently achieved the sales goals and was not a good fit for Envision due to the complexity of the program.  However, the variable pricing saved Envision over $300K during the 12-month span of this contract.

Return on Investment: Envision decided that due to various components, including a very complex business and sales model, that they would bring the call center 100% in-house.  CCOG went back and reviewed sales by location and its impact on gross margin (not just cost) for the last four years.  The data consistently showed that tenured, in-house agents performed better than any of the third-party vendors Envision had worked with.  Post our 2017 and 2018 consulting engagements with Envision, their sales per agent improved by more than 10% and more importantly their gross margins increased over 20% or $4M annually.