Company Culture and Flexible Staffing Drives Agent Retention

How we helped Montgomery Ward drive higher customer satisfaction scores.

With IMS Contact Services, Montgomery Ward quotes reduced costs and higher customer satisfaction.

IMS Contact Services boasts some of the highest agent retention rates in the industry through the use of employee incentives and a flexible staffing model.

The net result for Montgomery Ward is lower labor costs and high customer satisfaction scores.

IMS accomplishes such high customer satisfaction scores for Ward’s while keeping costs down with a combination of onshore and offshore outsourcing.

Montgomery Ward is Making a Resurgence in the eCommerce and Catalog Retail Space with the Support of IMS Contact Services.

Montgomery Ward outsources 100% of their contact center services to IMS Contact Services (IMS) and the reasons are plenty. A lot of companies like to talk about their company culture, but for IMS Contact Services, the proof is in the results.

IMS has almost 100 years of experience in retail contact centers. The parent company to IMS was founded in 1926 which makes IMS one of the longest running and most stable BPO companies in the world.

With that experience comes a lot of lessons learned about what works and what does not. IMS’ experience equates to a company culture that includes a combination of employee incentives, engaged work-from-home employees, and a flexible staffing model that employees value, improving employee retention.

For Montgomery Ward, that has meant having an outsourcing partner that has high employee retention rates to help reduce costs and high customer satisfaction scores to keep their customers coming back again and again. High satisfaction for Ward’s customers has meant incredible growth over the past decade and reviving the name of the historical retail giant.

Flexible Staffing

IMS’ staffing model for support of Montgomery Ward’s sales and service calls includes work-from-home, part-time staff that average 30 hours or less per week.

With flexibility to increase and decrease hours each week, IMS is able to support difficult-to-predict call volumes that come along with catalogs and other marketing campaigns.

In fact, IMS can often make intra-day increases to staffing to help Montgomery Ward manage their volumes that are often dependent on the mail being delivered timely.

This part-time flexible staffing model allows Montgomery Ward to staff 24/7 and manage their holiday peak season staffing effectively.

Company Culture

Many outsourcing companies like to talk about their company culture. For IMS Contact Services, their commitment to culture is evident in their employee retention. In 2021, IMS’ agent turnover was almost 50% lower than most U.S. based outsourcers.

Unlike other gig-worker model outsourcers, IMS’ agents are employees, not contractors. This allows IMS to provide their agents a level of company morale and engagement that is difficult to achieve in other models.

While other companies have recently adopted the work-from-home models and are going through the trial and error of learning how to manage a remote workforce, IMS has over 25 years of experience in the work-from-home model and understands how to engage and support remote workers.

But don’t take IMS’ word for it, just ask their employees.

In their latest employee survey IMS scored a 4.25 on a 5 point scale for employee satisfaction.

This combination of employee engagement, understanding what makes home agents successful, and treating employees well has paid off for Montgomery Wards.

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