Outsourcing works for Miami Lakes-based Inktel | DMBCC

One of the nation?s largest retailers had a problem.

Its high-quality store brands were being bought by thousands of customers each week. But customer questions about the products they bought were fielded by the employees at the dozens of companies that made the products, often leading to an inconsistent experience.

To improve communication, this retailer partnered with Inktel Direct, which takes on sometimes sensitive or sticky customer service problems. In this case, customer satisfaction improved to ?highly satisfied? on retail surveys.

Founded in 1997 and based in Miami Lakes, with other offices nationwide, Inktel is part of the business process outsourcing industry, a global industry with more than $100 billion in annual revenue, says Inktel?s founder and CEO J. Ricky Arriola.

?This whole industry is about doing for customers what they can?t do for themselves,? he says.

?Many (companies) have great customer care, distribution or marketing in-house,? Arriola says. ?But there are a lot that don?t have that in-house expertise, so they?ll outsource it. What we?re doing is providing the expertise that they may not have in-house.?

Outsourcing is a relatively new business practice, brought on by changes in technology that allow workers to communicate with one another over vast distances as easily as if they were sitting next to each other in the same room.

Although the industry is often blamed for sending U.S. jobs overseas to countries like India or the Philippines, where wages are lower, not every company operates this way.

Arriola stresses that all of Inktel?s employees are based in the United States, with 400 of those employees, largely in call center jobs, working in South Florida.

?There are still millions of jobs here,? Arriola says. ?A lot of this work, for a variety of business reasons, is being handled domestically. (It) has to be handled hyper-locally, too ? at the state, city or town levels.?

Vishnu Lekraj, who follows the business services sector for Morningstar Research, says the outsourcing industry continues to evolve.

?Outsourcing has been key to manufacturing in the 1990s and call centers in the 2000s,? Lekraj says.

?Businesses are utilizing outsourcing services to manage their cost structure better, and become more efficient and concentrate on their core competencies,? he says.

As companies become more efficient by partnering with outsourcing firms, the industry will continue to grow.

?The BPO sector has really exploded, but it is hard to measure (the growth),? says Chris Haerich, spokesperson for the Professional Association for Customer Engagement (PACE), one of the industry?s trade groups.

Although exact figures are hard to pin down, because not every company involved in the industry is a member or reports to PACE, the trade group estimates the industry has seen overall growth between 5 and 11 percent each year, she says.

For the past five years, Inktel has been one of the top performing companies in the trade association, says PACE president and CEO Phil Grudzinski.

?The business formula they use is about (offering an) exceptional customer experience,? Grudzinski says. ?The combination of being involved in the local market and offering best in class services has led it to where they are now.?

Article source: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/09/09/2994376/outsourcing-works-for-miami-lakes.html

Source: http://miamibrickellchamber.com/outsourcing-works-for-miami-lakes-based-inktel/

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