IndusFusion’s Outsourcing Blog

IndusFusion has been in the process of considering the upcoming events that we plan to attend over the next year or so. We thought we would share a brief ‘take’ on the various options out there and which ones we are considering attending.

In the ‘good old days’ Outsourcing and BPO was focused around voice and IT applications and the events were fairly limited. But in the last decade or so with the growth of offshore providers and seemingly limitless applications, there are now hundred’s of choices for groups focused in the BPO space (or companies with internal applications and staff conducting service and support functions).

These offerings include conferences, expos, summits, seminars, association meetings, etc. For the most part they are sponsored by the major associations, the industry publications, and the larger research and consultation firms.

With so many event options now, there is just no way to attend them all. So determining which events you or your companies choose to, or could benefit from attendance is very important. Several factors that should be considered:

1. The first consideration criteria should be; what is the primary need or value we are looking to obtain? Is educational information paramount? Is it networking? Business development? Something else?

This is important because different events have different focuses. Some are excellent if the need is to have your operational or service management gain insights into best practices, or new applications, hear case studies etc. While others may have little or no value in terms of the educational tracks offered (as they are obligatory or simply rudimentary), yet they offer an excellent venue for networking among ‘C level’ executives. Others have a distinct technology focus, which may be great to send your IT executives, but your VP of client services would find little or no value.

The point here is to consider: what is the key criterion I am looking for - then decide. The ‘biggest and best’ is not always the best for your needs.

2. Next is to consider - who is going. At many events we see companies who have a huge presence of staff. They will have Executive, Technology, Operational, and Client Management staff all at the same event. While we appreciate there may be incremental value in the old ‘show of force’ at an event where you may have many clients in attendance. Perhaps there are also some commercial economies (shared rooms, discounted rates with volume, etc)? However, it’s hard to believe the event will provide value across multiple company disciplines.

Most events primary value can be broken into three areas:

a. Educational
b. Networking and Business Development
c. Association and Industry Support

Look into the previous offerings the event provided, ask around, see where the focus has been and send the right team members to the right event.

3. And the last key consideration - budget. Typically you will have an annual expenditure you would like to keep within for such activities. Event costs can have a dramatic range, from low cost (or free) local chapter association events to large international conferences with high dollar attendance fees. There may be a show that would likely prove very beneficial, but yet with attendance cost, travel fees, etc sending just a couple of staff could put a huge dent in your budget. Could skipping that one in favor of adding three other shows that would have the same cost combined prove more beneficial even if the costly one would be your top choice overall?

Look into the various options for attendance. Some offer different levels of attendance, full conference, conference with sessions, special events, exhibit hall only, etc. Take a look, it’s not uncommon, in particular with executives, for someone to sign up for a full conference and between meetings, dinners, golf, etc never even get into a session. Why not just take the exhibit hall pass only if it is allowed? Heck, it is not even too uncommon now-a-days with restricted budgets to send business development people off to a show where clients and potential clients will be and not even sign up for anything – they simply set meetings before hand, hang out at the location or hotel and do business.

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To our thinking, local association events, chapter meeting, etc should all be ‘no-brainers’ – you should be out there, networking and supporting your industry. You should have representatives from every discipline of your company at these local events.

For the larger industry conferences you should have Executive and Business Development teams. The old saying always proves true…”if we get just one deal out of it..” – just make sure you pre plan as best as possible, setting meetings, letting others know you will attend, encouraging your clients attendance, etc.

The educational focused events is where you really need to do your homework. Many times these are the costliest events, yet perhaps the most beneficial to your organizations future success. Don’t let the VP Sales head out to the show just because he wants a Vegas trip in February and likes the local desert golf courses. Look at the real value, and send some of the support and service leaders of your company – the people who would gain from the sessions. If they have some fun along the way too, well, that’s just an added perk you offer.

Our brief take on (just) some of the many options in the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) space. We will for sure see you out there at some of these.

An Industry Veteran shares some keys to outsourcing from a client perspective

I thought I would launch my initial input by sharing some of the insights I have gained from working in the contact center and BPO space for the majority of my career. Most of these insights will be from the client perspective and are intended for you to get the most out of your existing or potential BPO engagement.

Rule Number One – Outsource for the right reasons. Are your objectives purely cost related or is outsourcing part of a larger enterprise strategy to leverage specialized firms for business processes that are ancillary to your core competency?

Rule Number Two –Outsource only what you can effectively manage. I have had the experience as a client of outsourcing multiple components of an enterprise support solution and the key was to develop an internal assessment for the suitability of various processes to actually be outsourced. Criteria to be considered include the following:

• Process maturity
• Process complexity
• Process stability

In other words, if your processes are not mature from a documentation, monitoring and baseline performance perspective, you will burn more energy and resources hand holding your outsourcing partner instead of monitoring performance results and working on process improvement initiatives. If you haven’t yet figured out what works best in your own backyard don’t expect a partner across the country or across the world to figure it out on their own.

Rule Number Three –Create an enterprise benefits realization methodology “before” you cut a deal. Some corporate managers make the assumption that an outsourcing agreement with attractive rates will automatically produce the desired financial benefits assumed. This may be true for the manager’s direct budget but how about the rest of the organization? If companies are not careful, they can get caught in a ”switch and bait” exercise of shifting costs from the outsourcing manager’s budget to the enterprise at large where the cost is obscured from association. What end’s happening is simply the transfer of the Outsourcing manager’s costs to other departments via lost employee productivity due to additional time needed to engage the outsourcer in everyday business processes.

Rule Number Four – Know your business better than your outsourced partner. If you think your outsourced partner will execute your processes better than you can without consistent investment of time and managerial oversight you better think twice. The responsibility for execution and performance results rests on both the client and the outsourced partner. Too many times client firms will throw processes “over the wall” and expect the outsourcer to manage everything to expectation without any client commitment to shared responsibility.

Rule Number Five – Treat your BPO provider with the level of respect and integrity that you expect to be treated as a client. There is nothing worse than to see client representatives operate from a domineering or bullying perspective. It is unprofessional and displays a lack of integrity and maturity. The impact of that can result in your BPO partner becoming less motivated to go out of their way or bring creative solutions or innovations to your business because they know you don’t respect them as true partners. Fix your attitude and watch how much your BPO partner will advocate for you internally. Not only that, they will also be more engaged and committed on your daily, weekly and monthly Operational and Business review sessions.

© 2007 Tracey Powell

IndusFusion shares a generic list of 43 criteria to evaluate the performance of the supervisor role in an outbound call center environment. Please feel free to use the template as a starting point for your internal needs.

Download PDF Here

This is Part I of a series of posts that will focus on presenting a perspective of a client who has contracted an business process outsourcing agency to provide call center services. The articles will be ‘open letter’ in style, detailing the client expectations for the vendor partner in various functions and capacities.


Part I - The Vendor Partner Staff

We feel the most critical component in any targeted call center effort is the day-to-day supervisory role. Our expectation of the partner entity is that they would staff a minimum one-to-ten ratio of supervisor positions to representative positions. It is also our expectation that this position is dedicated to the specific project and would have no other distractions that would prevent a typical supervisor role daily duty structure (i.e. other company or management obligations not specific to the effort). We would desire the role to be 80% coaching and monitoring of the calling staff. Meaning they listen to presentations then provide direct feedback to the representative on the calls monitored (inclusive of; what was well done, potential opportunities, call flow, diction, pass and tone, etc.). This time should also include documentation of the sessions and feedback so as tracking can be done to monitor the suggestions given. We expect that these written monitoring forms would be available to us (as the client) as requested to help assist in our review of the feedback given. The other 20% of their assigned time we would assigned to administrative functions – most importantly being agent and campaign statistical analysis that would assist in personnel management (looking at SLA’s versus goals, performance opportunities, providing written feedback and valuable ‘client thoughts’ back to the projects account management so they can provide this to the client.

We would also expect that when there are calling representatives that have been on the campaign and were not meeting performance levels, have been adequately coached and monitored and given every opportunity to succeed - would be removed and reassigned. We would not desire to micro manage the effort on an employee by employee basis. While the decision of ‘when is it time to remove a calling staff member’ is somewhat arbitrary, we would expect that the supervisory role can identify when they have done everything they can do to help the person succeed and they feel ‘the rep will likely not be able to get where they need to be’. In summary, we do expect (and even require) every opportunity given to the representative to succeed, we cannot allow inefficient performance to continue beyond this identification point.

Another key component in staff management is to ensure a successful, goal oriented work environment is provided. Here we expect that the physical nature of the working space is conducive to successful performance (comfortable chairs, adequate space, quality headsets and computing equipment, etc. Also relevant is that there is ongoing personal acknowledgment (and recognition) of successes for team members: incentives, contests, bonuses, fair compensation, internal advance opportunities, etc. Basically assurance that a successful, goal driven, positive environment is provided.