Selecting an outsource partner
Garlands offers the following ten tips to organisations looking to find the right outsourced partner:
1. Properly define your business objectives. Ensure that yours - and your outsourced partner’s - goals are compatible. They must be motivated to perform – you must fulfil your business needs at an acceptable price. It’s amazing the number of outsourced relationships where the two sides in the relationship start off with different goals and objectives.
2. Don’t think you can just ‘tack on’ on a contact centre operation to your existing business operations and processes. To be successful, the contact centre must be an integral part of an end-to-end customer management process that, for example, may start with the moment a customer picks a product off a shelf, and which involves all the departments within the organisation that the customer may come into contact with – sales, support, billing and service centre.
3. Ensure that the personnel working within your outsourced partner’s operations feel a part of your organisation. Ensure they are informed, that there are regular meetings to exchange information and ideas – and that they are surrounded by branded messages.
4. Pick a company that can work with you at a strategic level. In order to quickly and proactively respond to strategic changes within your business, your outsourced partner needs to be aligned with your business strategies.
5. Ensure your outsource partner can provide a broad range of customer contact services. In order to support a multi-faceted and mutually beneficial long term business relationship, it’s important that your customer service partner can not only provide basic customer call handling services but also higher value-added services such as specialist customer service, outbound customer acquisition, debt collection, customer retention, technical assistance, cross-selling, upselling, staff accounts, activations, credit management, customer registrations, customer lifecycle management and back office functions.
6. Pick a partner that can understand complex product propositions. Product support will become ever more complex as products become increasingly complex – broadband/ phone and TV ‘Triple Play’ products are a good example. To efficiently and effectively support these products, outsource specialists need to ensure their people are fully conversant with products as well as trained effectively to resolve customer issues.
7. Ensure that your partner can maximise each customer contact opportunity. This is increasingly important with the advent of complex products. Real Time Marketing is becoming increasingly important – i.e. using the customer contact opportunity to introduce customers to new products and services, and to educate them about ways that they can get more from existing products and services.
8. Pick a company that is flexible in its work practices. Distributed working will grow with a greater use of virtual contact centres where individual centres are physically separate but act as a single entity. Organisations will increasingly use mobile knowledge workers and home working will continue to grow.
9. Establish how you will measure performance. Measure the success of your outsourced relationship on a broad scale. i.e. not just in terms of the number of calls answered, but assess how well they are answered and how happy the customer is at the end of the process.
10. Don’t underestimate the management time required to make an outsourcing relationship work. It takes real teamwork to make it work – but the benefits in terms of reduced overall contact handling costs, higher customer satisfaction, more efficient contact handling will make it worthwhile.
Reputation, areas of expertise, breadth of services and cost are all important factors in successful outsourced relationships but, in many respects. the most important factor is trust. If you are entrusting care of your most important assets to another company you need to be 100% sure they will take care of them. So speak to other customers of the outsourcers you are considering, find out as much as you can about how they operate, about their people, assess whether you feel your managers could work well with the people at those companies, assess how they measure and reward performance etc. These 'soft' factors can be every bit as important as financially-based considerations.
WINNER, NOA Awards, Outsourced Contact Centre Provider of the Year: Garlands
