the final word
OUTSOURCING YOUR CALL CENTRE?
DON’T
DO
IT!
Colin Shaw has strong views about the pros - or rather the cons - of contact centre outsourcing and tells us why A regular client called me recently and said, ‘We are looking to outsource our contact centre, to cut costs, what are your thoughts’. This is what I told her…. Don’t do it!....Why would you want to outsource the most precious asset you have, your relationship with your Customers? I think anyone that outsources their contact with customers just to save money is mad. Surely this is one of the most strategic assets a company has? Zappo’s, the famous online and phone retailer in the US, encourages their employees to talk with Customers on the phone and calls the telephone ‘the best branding tool they have’. The only place I have seen this front line outsourcing work is Disney. I always remember walking around the Disney Village in Orlando, Florida and being impressed to see that all the employees there looked and acted as if they were ‘Disney people’. I marveled at the fact they didn’t just look like Disney people, they felt like Disney people in the way they dealt with me. When I investigated a little deeper I found that although the Disney Village was all franchised businesses but Disney treated the people as if they were part of Disney. The recruitment, training, what they wore were all Disney. As far as these people were concern they worked at Disney but happen to get their pay check from the franchised company. This type of outsourcing works, but it is rare.
Reduce costs equals failure What I see mainly is too many companies outsourcing their Call centres to reduce costs. This invariably turn into abject failure. Why? Because they have done it soley on the basis of reducing costs. We all know that customer do not like being transferred to people outside their native country as they feel that they don’t understand them. This is not helped when the person lies to them when the customer asks them their name, and they reply in a deep accent their name is ‘Robert’, when it is not.
matter. I have seen ‘successful’ outsourcing where it shows that the transactional targets have been met. The calls have been answered quicker, the orders processed quicker etc…. but that is about the ‘what’. When you look at the Customer satisfaction stats (asking Customers what they thing), these normally decline to where they were when the call Centre was in house. This is the ‘how’, and in my view the ‘how’ is as important as the ‘what’.
Where’s the customer? The issue for me is this most outsourcing is done with little thought to the Customer Experience other than platitudes as the contract is being sold and signed. All the measures and targets written into the contact are transactional ie: how many calls, how long to answer the call etc. They do not include true Customer measures by which I mean asking the customer directly in regular surveys. I think it is simple. If you are truly concerned about the Customer Experience by all means outsource your call centers but have true customer measures, like Net Promoter in place. Now let the achievement of this be baked into the contract and account for 50% of the targets. I rarely see that happen. What does work, is outsourcing ‘back office’ work, ie: work that doesn’t have a direct interface with the customer, even IT, HR. The key here is these people do not communicate, with customers directly at all. So my advice to my client was don’t do it, as I saw they were being tempted by the savings and were not thinking about the customer.
Lying to a Customer is not a good idea. But here is the heart of the
Colin Shaw is founder & CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world’s first organizations devoted to customer experience. Colin is an international author of four best-selling books, an engaging key-note speaker & also recognized as one of the original top 150 Business Influencers by LinkedIn. Beyond Philosophy provide consulting, specialized research & training from their headquarters in Tampa, Florida, USA. Follow Colin Shaw on Twitter: @ColinShaw_CX ISSUE FOURTEEN • APRIL 2014
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