CallingtheCape

Outsource Partner: Mindpearl

Call centre outsourcing – a Customer Management Q&A Special

In another in our series of Sponsored Customer Management Specials we quiz Steven Humphries of PokerNetwork about its relationship with Mindpearl.

Q. Tell us about PokerNetwork (Ongame) and its position in the marketplace

PokerNetwork is a part of the Ongame Group, which is a privately owned company based in Sweden. The group has about 180 employees. The revenue in 2004 was approximately 60 MUSD and the profit approximately 20 MUSD. PokerNetwork is the world’s fifth largest network for online poker and has over 3.8 million registered players. The largest site in the network is PokerRoom.com. Examples of other partners are HollywoodPoker and BetOnBet. PokerNetwork’s success stems from the quality of products, services, games and software we provide for our partners.

• Multi-platform online poker system
• Advanced integrated back-end system
• Secure electronic payment services
• Brand building skins and games
• Slick enjoyable and easy to use games
• World leader in Java based games (non-download)
• Industry standard for Customer Services

Q. How did PokerNetwork first get involved with Mindpearl?

After extensive research into international offshore Contact Centres serving the European and US market, we found Cape Town to be a real growth location for the industry; mainly fueled by investment from UK based business. English is spoken as a first language by 3 million of Cape Town’s 4 million inhabitants, with an overall literacy rate of about 96%. There is also reasonable availability for other European languages including French, German and Dutch (around 20,000 native speakers of each).

Through help from Calling The Cape, a government funded agency dedicated to Call Centre development in the local region, we set up meetings with a broad cross-section of suppliers. After numerous excellent site visits and presentations it became apparent that Mindpearl Cape Town had the closest match to our one non-negotiable criterion, company culture.

Q. What were the key challenges and issues you were facing at the time?

The key challenges for us at that time were harmonising Call Centre expansion with the incredible growth in the Network, while maintaining our superb standards of product knowledge, service level, and brand loyalty. We can not stress enough how important it is for an online business to provide first class customer services; you can host games with cutting edge graphics and state of the art gameplay but if you can not back it up with what the player perceives as the only real human element of your product, customer support, then you will lose their trust. When choosing to outsource many investors see the reduction in costs as the number one issue, but we felt that the potential for brand damage cold be catastrophic if agent quality was not treated equal to or higher than cost. It doesn’t matter what telecoms or software a Call Centre uses if it falls down at the human level.

Another challenge was recruiting agents with the language skill sets we required for our ever expanding market. We felt the surest way to manage the constant growth and change was to investigate the possibility of outsourcing to an offshore supplier.

Q. How has Mindpearl helped solve the issues you face?

With Mindpearl the costs were competitive, but we found the real advantages to be the high degree of cultural proximity to the UK/US matched with the calibre and great customer empathy.

Customer Management Magazine – Volume 13 Issue 3
May/ June 2005