Today we’d like to introduce you to Abby Leibowitz.
Hi Abby, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
I am not sure I have ever heard of a little girl who dreamt of growing up to run an international contact center business. However, here I am today.
I started in the call center industry just 2 weeks after graduating from college when I was unsure what I wanted to do next and deciding whether I would delay the decision by going to more school. I got started by helping my dad in his local telephone answering service (a segment of the call center industry) business with administrative duties, like payroll and facilities management.
At the time, he was unsure about the future of his business and encountered some growing pains. As I spent time in his office, I would observe areas that I thought could be improved or jump in when anyone needed assistance. As needs arose, I met them. Within a year, I was creating and running Sales, Customer Service, Operations, Human Resources, Facilities, Marketing, and Accounting departments.
I became President of the organization and obtained a business degree shortly after. I was named CEO and made an owner as well from the transformation that the company encountered. More recently, I founded my own robot-driven information processing software company inspired by my experience in the contact center industry.
There are so many jobs and industries that get missed in our current education system – many places where someone can make a difference or positions where you can find meaning in a non-traditional way.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It has been a rollercoaster. However, since I played things safely for most of my career so far (had a Plan A, Plan B, Plan C, Plan D… Plan Z), there were many directions that the company could go as we encountered challenges.
There were struggles with learning to scale – such as how to get employees to grow along with you and acquire the motivation, skills, and foresight to evolve with your business. There were struggles with how to stay competitive in a fast-moving technical environment – this can involve trying to change to a new system and how to prioritize upgrades. The bigger we became, the harder it was to make changes and stay flexible with our innovation. It has been a constant balancing act.
In addition to the human management challenges, businesses also have to navigate expectations from our government agencies on what a business is required to report and maintain (such as the changing regulation and growing costs of health insurance).
There are also challenges in how to structure a business – one example is whether to utilize organic growth or make acquisitions. Among other balancing acts, we have done this all while staying open 24/7, navigating hurricanes, snowstorms, or whatever else comes our way.
Sometimes I think I have seen every challenge, but then something new comes in, like a pandemic or a cyber terror threat.
So, no, it has not been a smooth road, but we have been fortunate to formulate a stable, consistent business model and offer enough diversity in our services that we are master problem solvers and reinvent ourselves whenever necessary.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Call Experts is a high-touch, high-tech, and boutique contact center brand, with abilities in chat and specializing in API-driven CRM integrations with our clients’ own systems. We have experience in virtually every industry and in navigating the ebbs and flows of customer communication needs. We are often the hidden voice or engine behind customer service communication.
We got our start answering the phones for many Charleston-based companies and now service companies all over the world. We have employed thousands of people in the state of South Carolina, most in Charleston. Currently, since COVID-19, our call center staff is home-based and our offerings have evolved into also providing many new methods of non-voice communication, in several languages.
Abridged Solutions is a newer concept that creates simple turn-key communication solutions for businesses. Our solutions can be integrated into existing systems. Our goal is to simplify the purchasing and technical build learning curve for companies who need something that works fast to solve an information relay problem.
Therefore, I like to think of us as professional robot trainers. We take systems that appear to be very complex and we program things in the simplest way possible so that they can be adopted by a business to collect and relay information.
We then use this to help solve other problems, like present data on business operations. Our main product is called Attendance Bridge and it is for tracking attendance incidents for large hourly workforces, primarily in the manufacturing or hospitality industries.
In terms of your work and the industry, what are some of the changes you are expecting to see over the next five to ten years?
The industry has been evolving quickly. People’s comfort level with outsourcing and the need to utilize alternative forms of communication has grown post-pandemic.
Also, many industries feel the need for additional automation. Many companies are reconsidering where you need humans versus implementing automated solutions. I believe this trend will continue.
We will want humans to do what humans need to do – which is invent, build, implement, and quality check technology. I expect that most companies will continue to look for technology that can replace repetitive human work.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.attendancebridge.com
- Other: www.callexperts.com
