19th Annual Top 50 Outbound Teleservices Agencies Ranking
This is the nineteenth year Customer Inter@ction Solutions magazine brings you its Top 50 Teleservices Agency Ranking. In this issue, we are presenting the Top 50 outbound portion of the ranking. (The inbound portion of the ranking will be highlighted in the April 2004 issue.) Since its inception in 1986, our Top 50 ranking has been used as the benchmark for choosing large-capacity/sized teleservices agencies.
Ranking Basis
Since the basis of our ranking is company size, Customer Inter@ction Solutions uses a measurable, third-party-verifiable aspect of teleservices to arrive at our list of the Top 50 agencies: the number of minutes each agency was billed by each of its phone companies for telephone service for 12 months, encompassing November 2002 through October 2003. We have found this to be an accurate and reliable reflection of the amount of teleservices each agency does, and therefore, provides a true reflection of its size.
Qualification Criteria
To qualify for inclusion in this years Top 50, the agencies were required to answer a questionnaire detailing the nature of their business and listing their number of billable minutes between November 2002 and October 2003. The questionnaire had to be verified with the signature of each agency's president/CEO. In addition, each agency had to submit a letter of verification from each of its telephone service providers certifying the number of minutes for which it billed the agency during the designated period. (Our sincere gratitude is extended to all the carriers for their thorough and expeditious provision of these data.)
Exceptions
Agencies that did not supply this third-party verification were disqualified, with the exception of three circumstances: 1) a client of the service agency was billed directly for its telephone service and would not provide a letter of verification for anonymity reasons; 2) part of the billable minutes were with a foreign telecommunications carrier that could not provide the data by the deadline; 3) legitimate business situations prevented an agency from obtaining verification from certain of its carriers or a certain carrier. For each of these circumstances, we allow the company to certify a portion of the missing minutes with a letter of explanation and signed verification of billable minutes pertaining to the explanation from the president/CEO of the agency. You will find an asterisk next to the name of all Top 50 agencies that supplied a portion of their verification from their president/CEO due to one of the three circumstances identified above. In all cases, from the questionnaires to the letters of verification, the agencies were warned that should falsification be detected, they would be disqualified from this and all future Top 50 rankings. And indeed, Customer Inter@ction Solutions magazines editorial staff carefully verified calculations, discrepancies and other aspects of the supplied information to ensure that this ranking is of true value to you.
Understanding The Listings
As you read through the following list of Top 50 agencies, you will notice that we have provided a numerical ranking of 1 through 41 (1 being the largest), but have not revealed the number of billable minutes used to arrive at this ordering. This was done out of respect for the confidential nature of this information to the many agencies included here that are privately held corporations. This year, only 41 companies met with our minimum criteria of billable minutes to be included in the outbound ranking. You will notice that the outbound ranking has been divided into two categories: A and B. Category A is composed of U.S. service agencies whose primary business function is provision of telemarketing services for outside firms. If you are considering an international teleservices campaign, Category B consists of international teleservices agencies. Again this year we have separated out all international teleservices done by U.S. agencies and ranked those companies international minutes in the International category, Category B. Domestic companies that are also ranked in the International category are marked with a dagger in their domestic ranking.
CATEGORY B - International
1. SR. Teleperformance
2. MsourcE Corp. *
3. RMH Teleservices *
4. Client Center Alliance
5. SITEL Corp. *
6. Xentel DM Inc.
7. ICT Group, Inc. *
8. Convergys Corp. *
9. Atesia S.p.A. *
10. TeleSpectrum Worldwide
11. Technion Communications Corp. *
12. eTelecare International *
13. TCIM Services, Inc. *
14. PCCW Contact Center Business *
15. Teleperformance USA *
16. ClientLogic *
17. DialAmerica Marketing, Inc. *
18. Harte-Hanks, Inc. *
19. Americall Group, Inc. *
20. Vision-X, Inc. *
