Avoid the Mistakes & Misconceptions of Contact Center Outsourcing

The most rudimentary of political debates has fueled a common conception of outsourcing: that it reduces costs and thus increases profits.

As a result, there exists a tendency within customer management to break the contact center outsourcing discussion into a simple, binary exercise: outsource and save money at the expense of autonomy-driven customer satisfaction or insource and spend money to deliver the best possible experience.

While idealized, flawless conceptions of outsourced and in-house call center environments would likely produce that dynamic, the reality is much more complicated. And if customer management leaders do not approach outsourcing correctly, they risk undermining their customer experience without even optimizing cost savings as a compromise.

"Most of the people think outsourcing is a quick way to reduce costs and enhance productivity, however according to my point of view it is not [necessarily] true," says Sandra De Soyza, group chief customer officer, Dialog Telekom.

DeSoyza, who is speaking at the 3^rd Annual Contact Centres Asia, 20-21 March in Singapore, cautions professionals, "While making a decision for outsourcing one must keep in mind the intent as well as the readiness to outsource activities. Not everything can be outsourced [and the] most basic question of the organization’s readiness to outsource and manage the operation needs a firm ‘yes.’"

Already faced with the burden of handling the knowledge transition crucial to any successful outsourcing engagement, professionals also face the pivotal challenge of benchmarking the alignment between the outsourced center’s performance and its own customer management objectives.

While companies have objectives like cost saving, expertise, productivity enhancement…one needs to be really careful in terms of defining the KPIs against which the partner must deliver," clarifies DeSoyza. "What was being measured internally can be completely different to what will be measured in the outsourcing engagement."

Driving this wedge is the inherent distinction between the corporation’s objectives for its contact center and the outsourced partner’s objectives.

"Say an inbound operation which used to be a cost center, when outsourced, becomes [the main] revenue opportunity for the outsourced partner," ponders DeSoyza. "The objectives completely change from minimizing costs to maximizing revenues, [and though] his may not even feature in the [original] KPI list, [it could] be the silent driver for how the engagement will evolve. Such things have to be dealt with due care and diligence."

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The evolving role of the contact center in today’s multi-channel environment establishes further consideration points when eyeing a prospective outsourcer. A certain outsourced call center, for instance, might have a significantly-efficient workforce for handling telephone customer support inquiries.

But will that same center be able to successfully deliver support on Twitter? Does it have strategies in place for managing online reputation as customers share complaints on social media? Is it capable of delivering a personalized "upsell" that drives revenue from customer engagements?

The best outsourcing partner is going to align its contact center practices with the desires of the business—those predicated strictly on efficiency, in many cases, need not apply.

And the process begins with a business looking inside to determine what its priorities are for the contact center. The second customer experience and engagement factors enter the efficiency equation is the second outsourcing cannot be compared to insourcing on a strict cost and resources basis.

If businesses want to create true "partnerships" with vendors, they must properly define the metrics on which the customer experience provider (the outsourced contact center) will be accountable. They then must determine what kind of knowledge sharing, training and cultural shift is needed to actually execute the change.

Without following that strategic approach, businesses will pay their partners for work that falls short of key contact center objectives and therefore fail to optimize profitability through outsourcing.