Skybridge Americas: “For Us, It’s About Partnership”

Customer needs and expectations are always changing. While no business can predict each new trend, market change, or international crisis, brands that prevail are the brands that invest in the expertise and infrastructure to remain nimble, quick, and super responsive.

That’s the philosophy of Skybridge Americas, the business process outsourcer (BPO) and one-stop solution provider for all customer care needs.

No doubt, Skybridge Americas is one of the most innovative companies we’ve seen. This is why we got in touch with Bobby Matthews, the Senior Vice President, Sales and Marketing at Skybridge Americas to tell us more about the company.

Tell us a few factors that make your company an innovative hub in today’s global market.

As I mentioned, we remain innovative because we consistently invest in bleeding-edge technology. Right now, we’re particularly excited to be launching our new conversational Artificial Intelligence solution called SkyAI. With SkyAI, we’re able to map ideal call paths and employ the latest speech recognition innovations to route calls between IVR, chatbot, and live agent, determined by call type and customer need. The system enables total fluidity of each call so that, at any point, our virtual agents are capable of transferring the customer – along with the data already collected during the call – to a live agent. This capability allows us to operate with greater efficiency and productivity but more importantly, creates a better customer experience.

Excerpts from the interview

Take us back to the founding moment when this company began.

Our company was founded in 1953 in Minnesota, as Maple Plains Fulfillment and acquired by Carlson Marketing Group in 1973. During a long-term collaboration with the company in the mid-2000s, entrepreneur Mark Morris was impressed by the extraordinary dedication of the company’s team members and the longevity of the company’s relationships with so many iconic brands. Seeing the potential to build on those strengths, he acquired the company in 2011, renaming it Skybridge Americas.

Considering the time period of your company’s inception, how would you describe the journey so far?

For us, it’s about partnership. That means we embrace each client’s mission and brand strategy and we collaborate on the best ways to deliver superior customer experience. As their customers’ needs change, these brands adapt to meet those needs. And they need a customer care partner that is willing and financially capable of adapting, too. Literally, everything we do is geared toward helping our clients build up their brand equity.

That’s what led to the creation of our Agents Anywhere delivery platform. With Agents Anywhere, we’re able to find, recruit, and retain call center agents who not only bring the right skills to the job but bring their own affinity for the product or service they’ll be supporting. We consistently find that when we hire agents who already love the brand, they’re intensely passionate about pleasing each customer on every call.

Can you brief us about your products and services?

Sure, we provide customer care, sales, technical support, emergency roadside dispatching, back office support, medical and appointment scheduling across all channels; inbound and outbound voice, email, chat, SMS text, USPS mail and social media. Using a cloud-based, virtual platform, we deliver a uniform, positive experience for all agents and consistently superior customer experience for all of the brands we support, providing a stable, secure environment across all contact channels. By leveraging real, actionable data, we have been able to enable smarter decision making without the CapEx Investment or other operational expenses that are so often associated with acquiring and maintaining technology.

Meet the Leader

Bobby Matthews has spent the past twenty-five years negotiating large, complex sales agreements, and cultivating long-term, win-win relationships with key strategic partners. In 2017, he joined Skybridge Americas, leading the organization’s sales, marketing, and rebranding initiatives. Before that, Bobby was Senior Vice President of Client Services for S2G Support Services Group.

He has also held numerous senior executive positions in sales, marketing, operations, logistics, product management, and technical services for American industry leaders including Ameritech, AT&T, MCI, and Comdisco. Bobby is a twelve-year veteran of the United States Army, having served on active duty, in the National Guard, and Special Forces as a Detachment Commander. He and his son are also experienced Surfboard Shapers, designing and building art quality, custom-made surfboards by hand.

“Our clients count on us as active participants in their planning process.”

“Innovation is a commitment to being flexible and an ability to invest in the right changes at the right times.”

Customers/clients are those who tap into your innovative products and services. Tell us about your customers/clients.

At Skybridge, we specialize in supporting a limited number of iconic brands. We customize every program to reflect and enhance the brand promise of that company. Because we recognize that no two clients are identical, we’re proud of the fact that no two Skybridge programs are exactly alike either. There are no cookie cutters here. Instead, we seek to mirror the culture of each client through very careful hiring, exhaustive and precise training, and deep brand immersion. Doing that successfully calls for innovation and flexibility at every level of the organization and we have built our culture around that idea.