Advantage Communications' outsourced helpdesk offering targets smaller, rural ISPs with a flexible and affordable solution.

by Jeff Goldman [October 29, 2008]

The outsourced contact center provider Advantage Communications, founded back in 1996, has its headquarters in Charlottetown on Canada's Prince Edward Island. "It started as an outbound organization for the first year or two, doing surveys and a bit of telemarketing, but in about 1998 we got into inbound Internet support, supporting dial-up and high speed and wireless and webhosting," says company CEO Kent MacPhee. "You name it, we've done it."

MacPhee, the former COO of competitor OLS, acquired the company with a group of investors in September of this year. "They never really did a tremendous amount of marketing, so I deemed the company a pretty well-kept secret. This was a smaller organization that I felt had a really, really solid foundation, and great people—the tenure of the employees here at Advantage is almost unheard of," he says.

That length of tenure, MacPhee says, extends throughout the company. "Many of the management team have been here for 10 years plus, with some fresh ones along the way . . . and we have 75 percent of our workforce with two years' experience or more—in the industry, that is not commonplace—and 25 percent of those have five years and more," he says.

Advantage Communications Voice: (800) 296-4022 info@advantagecall.com

MacPhee says the company makes it a priority to reward that loyalty. "A lot of places have call centers, and we're one of three here in Charlottetown—but despite our competitive pricing, we also pay the best wages, because we keep our overhead to an acceptable level," he says.

MacPhee suggests that any ISP looking to outsource their support should ask every potential provider about their wages, to get a sense of how competitive they are in their labor market. "Our rates are notably lower, and our wages are on the top shelf here," he says. "That has us in a pretty good position to attract the best, and I think that certainly correlates with our retention."

Service strengths
While the company specifically targets smaller, rural ISPs, MacPhee says Advantage serves clients of all sizes. "There are programs that might have as few as a couple of full time equivalents serving their customers in a dedicated or a shared environment, but we also have customers with 100-plus FTEs dedicated their program," he says. "So we do have scalability—and we have capacity in our three centers right now to grow."

And although Advantage is focused on providing inbound support, MacPhee says the company is also happy to provide outbound calling services for winback programs or surveys. "I'm very big on CSAT surveys, and if clients don't acquire a partner to do it for them, I know we may be a bit biased, but we like to them on ourselves anyway . . . and I'm very, very big on winning back customers," he says.

One of the company's greatest strengths, MacPhee says, is Resolve Helpdesk, its proprietary, web-based incident tracking and reporting system, which provides Advantage's clients with a wide range of real-time reports. "Our customers are very happy with its functionality and reporting mechanisms," MacPhee says.

Basic pricing is listed on the company's website, with per subscriber, per minute, per agent hour, and per incident pricing available. "We will always stay very flexible to meet our clients' needs," MacPhee says. "We work hard with people to find what they can afford."

Focused on flexibility
That flexibility, MacPhee says, also extends to the company's service levels, which are generally maintained at 80 percent of calls answered in 20 seconds. "That's our traditional service level offering, but if somebody can only budget for a three-minute average wait time, then we can tailor something to that as well," he says.

And MacPhee notes that current exchange rates are making the offering even more affordable than it used to be. "With the U.S. dollar improving and the Canadian dollar weakening, that works in our favor and in our clients' favor in the U.S., because we can give them the edge in pricing," he says.

MacPhee says Advantage also strives to keep its pricing as straightforward as possible. "We don't get into nickel-and-diming," he says. "Sometimes people will throw a low price at you, but then, if you want an extra report, it's $25, or it's $50 for programming a new type of report. Our prices are all-inclusive—what you see is what you get."

Ultimately, MacPhee says Advantage Communications' key strength lies in its flexibility in working with its clients. "We try to provide whatever our clients need," he says. "We work in true partnership with them, seeing what collectively we can afford to offer and stay competitive. The way I look at it, we're North American quality with near offshore pricing."

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	[Sept. 22, 1999]	Startup Concerns

Online resources:
	Outsourced Customer Support Directory
	Quick Reference Chart