Critique the viability of this idea.
I think the basic economics for a specialized negotiating call center work out easily with people making $10/hour. One of the big costs of negotiating with providers is waiting on hold. But your call center software can recognize when an operator comes on the line and automatically route the call to a currently available negotiating specialist.
Now as to the idea, I think it falls into the, "I'd use that" category from a user perspective and would have a B2C model; in my view of it, you would sell directly to consumers or partner with companies to sell at a discount to their members/userbase.
* How do you bill? Do you bill differently for monthly bills (i.e. utilities, car loans) vs. one-time expenses (i.e. jewelry purchase)?
* Is this an unbiased service or will your company step in at "just the right time" and say, "You can save $100 on car insurance right now with our preferred provider!"
* What is the average amount to be negotiated? If it is $100/month bill, then you should be able to negotiate down to $85-$89.99/month. That means you save the customer, on average, $12/month in that scenario. How do you convince me, the customer, that your price is worth my saving $12 a month?
* How much did it cost you, the entrepreneur, to save your customer that money? I'd assume it cost a minimum of $7 in raw time on the phone/logging the call and then another $10-$100 in training/software/"misc" costs depending on what they were negotiating.
Anyway, just random thoughts. This is one of those, "Cool idea but I can't figure out how to actually make money with it" ideas to me.
Some truth here, but there are other reasons to work in a call center besides low skill set. Working part time while in college at a schedule that is good for the employee would be one.
These are all things that can be done for $10/hour. The trickier negotiations are things like what you would do with Comcast, where there are deals to be had, but they often involve slight changes to your service. That either requires some judgment or someone who can take notes and get confirmation from you.
The service providers certainly wouldn't like it but I'm not sure there's much they can do.
1) How wold the negotiations be facilitated? My guess is that this would have to be actual human-to-human contact, which seems expensive. One way to keep the costs down may be to develop a filtering system that only accepts users with bills that have a high likelihood of being eligible for some discount. That way your resources would only be spent on the users most likely to generate revenue for you.
2) Do service providers like cell phone companies discuss account details with a third party who is not the account holder? It seems like the type of thing that a big company wouldn't want to allow for any number of reasons (i.e. privacy concerns, preventing an "agent" from negotiating on behalf of the user).
Some aspects of your idea are topically similar to BillShrink.com although they aren't doing any negotiating on behalf of individual users. They are doing quite well.
