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StratSource and Primary Matters, Inc. identify the Total Cost of Ownership and Budget Impact of Outsourcing Contact Center Agent Recruiting

Call center hiring experts discover 5% to 8% total budget reductions for contact centers due to their ability to increase new agent job retention.

DALLAS, TEXAS, July 9, 2002 -- Strategic Outsourcing Corporation (StratSource), among the foremost experts in large-scale hiring for call centers, today announced it has completed an in-depth Total Cost of Ownership and Impact Analysis of its recruiting services using Primary Matters services and software product - The Contact Center Guide™.

The analysis focused on changes in budgets, labor demographics, productivity and total headcount that result from using StratSource's agent recruiting process in large contact centers.

Alan Cayton, the StratSource CEO, said, "With corporations' emphasis on productivity and cost savings, StratSource's focus on selecting new agents who have a much higher 1st year job retention provides a surprising increase in overall productivity and budget savings. In our customers, this leads to a total budget cost savings of 5% to 8% phased in over 6 to 9 months. This is due to the fact that the typical new agent hired by StratSource fits the employment needs better and stays on the job longer, therefore, leading to an agent workgroup that has more experience, is more productive, and offers a higher quality of service to a company's customers."

Alan continued, "The analysis created by Primary Matters has made our clients and us aware of the significant impact available from increasing new agent retention in a contact center. Many large contact centers have a turnover of 50% or greater in their new hires who have less than 1 year of experience. The costs of this are enormous, much higher than most organizations are aware. The analysis provided by Primary Matters focused on these costs, using performance and retention estimates from StratSource's customer base."

StratSource emphasizes matching the profile of new hires with the contact center job requirements through the combination of its software product, e-venueSM, combined with its recruiting services.

This software streamlines applicant processing across the board, and supports a better match of new hires with the job requirements. The benefits of this software include:

Candidate Identification, where there is efficient and accurate real-time evaluation of the candidate population,
Candidate Education, which supports a realistic job preview to identify and differentiate the employment brand that will optimally meet the skills and retention goals of a company,
Candidate Qualification, which efficiently and accurately, in real-time, evaluates the incoming applications so that when there is a match StratSource can immediately focus on hiring the candidate, and
Real-time information provided to candidates regarding their results to ensure that the candidates best fitting the profiles are quickly moved towards employee status.

Using this system, applicants are educated in job requirements, screened, and those who qualify are immediately scheduled for the next phase in the recruiting process (whether that is a face-to-face interview or additional screening, such as an examination).

According to Greg Borton, CEO and founder of Primary Matters, "We were able to capture and detail each of the elements of change in the contact center as it transitioned from an internal to a specialist outsourced agent recruitment process. What was most interesting was the significant impact of the agent productivity as a result of the increased job retention in the new hires. Such increased retention has an impact in the 5% to 10% range on overall budgets, due only in part to the reduced hiring costs. Most important was the benefit of a more skilled overall workforce as the average job duration of the employees increased."

To understand this impact, new hire job retention data from StratSource's experience at its customers was used to populate Primary Matters' Contact Center Guide™. There was a specific focus on the before and after scenarios, thus identifying changes in hiring costs, agent productivity, retention and skills in order to estimate and project the financial and employment consequences of outsourcing the agent recruiting process. As the model unfolded its results, there was an increase in the more experienced agent group, which drove much of the productivity impact resulting from StratSource's new agent recruiting practices.

The Contact Center Guide™ provided the analytic analysis identifying the changes in employee compositFebruary 12, 2005n support and planning software for use in contact centers, technical support organizations, help desks, field installation and maintenance groups and other operationally intensive environments. Its ease of use and prepackaged content results in major business benefits in hours, or at most days, thus significantly enhancing the ability of management staff and consultants to deliver enterprise wide performance improvement. It provides monthly budgets, activity costs, personnel and technology requirements looking out three years. It supports rapid scenario analysis, ROI and Total Cost of Ownership comparisons to better enable informed business decisions.

About Strategic Outsourcing Corporation

Strategic Outsourcing Corporation, better known as StratSource, helps companies with large-scale mission critical hiring needs. With a thorough understanding of mass hiring, StratSource helps customers build a competitive advantage through innovative candidate generation techniques and effective applicant processing. Dallas based StratSource has assisted with building the nation's largest companies, including Sprint PCS, Allstate and FedEx Corp. For more information about StratSource's services, visit www.stratsource.com, or call 972-437-2220.

About Primary Matters, Inc.

Primary Matters, Inc. provides software products and services which support planning decisions in virtually any operationally intensive business environment. Its flagship product, The Contact Center Guide™ is activity based, content rich software that uncovers underlying costs of customer contact centers and other activity intensive corporate functions such as sales groups, field organizations and technical support groups. Business goals can now be linked to the resource requirements needed to meet these goals.

The product's goal is to enable management groups and consultants to focus better, understand the financial and labor impacts of each possible route forward, compare alternative strategies using quantitative information, make the best forward-looking business decisions, and measure and adjust their plans as each month passes

For more information, contact Mary Jo Kulp, CEO, 707-833-1564.

StratSource is a trademark of Strategic Outsourcing Corp. All other trade names and marks are the property of their respective holders.

The Contact Center Guide™ is a trademark of Primary Matters, Inc.

Editorial Contact:
Mary Jo Kulp
Primary Matters, Inc.
707-833-1564
greg.borton@primarymatters.com