Strategies for Melding an In-house and Outsourced Partnership
1 Nov, 2007
By: Brenda HardingOutsourcing relationships have matured dramatically in recent years. Whereas outsourcing was primarily seen as a cost consideration in the past, these services are now being seen as a key strategic element in many companies’ overall customer service strategy. But with this new mindset, comes higher expectations.
To provide the level of service customers demand, outsourcers must provide value in terms of quality and flexibility, not just through a one-dimensional cost-cutting arrangement. Moreover, clients have come to expect and demand that outsourcers operate not just as a safety valve, but as a value-added, integrated partner with full accountability. The executives signing off on outsourcing agreements are under intense scrutiny to their board, to their customers and even to political pressure at all levels to make outsourcing decisions they feel comfortable with and can justify on far more than cost considerations.
Outsourcing clients won’t settle for relationships that consist of little more than handing over a call volume target and a monthly check. Long-term outsourcing relationships require transparency and accountability. To operate as a strategic resource, outsourcers must maintain their own best practices while coming as close as possible to truly becoming an extension of the client’s own customer service organization — both in sprit and at the operational data level.
Operating as a Unified Group
To achieve desired transparency, there remains a fundamental challenge: managing the in-house and outsourced customer care operation as a unified group. In the past, this has been a difficult balancing act. Outsourcers have their own internal workforce management policies and procedures. Yet the companies rendering their services still want visibility into the day-to-day, minute-by-minute nuances of the contact handling, no matter who is providing the service.
Transparency is the gateway to closer cooperation.
Overcoming Transparency
Challenges
To gain much-needed transparency, outsourcers and their clients can realize immediate benefits from a closer link between each organization’s respective forecasting and planning system. Shared forecasts, coordinated by a central workforce management solution that integrates seamlessly with an outsourcer’s own management software, can better prepare everyone for fluctuations in contact volume.
By making forecasting and planning a collaborative process, both the outsourcer and the client can avoid unpleasant shocks. No outsourcer wants to be caught unaware of an impending and otherwise unexpected shift in call volume. By the same token, clients may not always understand the contract implications of fluctuating call volumes. Jointly producing a long-term, shared staffing plan gives both parties an opportunity to tweak internal obligations as well as the service contract – instead of being surprised by them.
With an integrated solution, scheduling data can be shared at both the big picture and interval level. A common approach is to provide projections and total seat scheduling over a three-week window, with precise daily interval updates transmitted securely to the client’s view every 15 minutes during operating hours. This type of arrangement gives client and outsourcer relationship managers plenty of time to address forecasting discrepancies in the big picture view, and provides a satisfactory level of hands-on accountability at the daily level.
Armed with this information, outsourcers and their clients can even share scheduling responsibilities. Depending on how the linkages are constructed and the comfort levels of both parties, the outsourcer can continue to generate its own schedules and share them upstream to the client or the client can generate the schedules for outsourcing agents along with its own internal resources. Either way, a fully integrated outsource management solution honors the precise caller needs represented in the client’s own call routing logic.
Partnering for Success
Transparency is more than just a way to satisfy an emerging marketplace demand. Forging closer operational and strategic ties makes both the outsourcer and the client more accountable. Clients, having made an investment to connect their own forecasting and planning system to their chosen outsourcers, will be motivated to continually strengthen those links, enabling the outsourcer to manage contact volume better than ever. At the same time, outsourcers will be able to refine their processes more keenly to serve the distinct needs of those clients they are better integrated with to maximize their own ROI.
