Contact Center Outsourcing - Key To Organizational Success

Contact centers are that vital communication link between businesses and their customers and even though an in-house facility may satisfy basic needs and requirements, it is always better to choose contact center outsourcing services, preferably rendered by an offshore outsourcing company. The main reason is that an offshore outsourcing company will make it easier for businesses to derive essential benefits such as cost savings. Some of the best outsourcing companies have their operations based in developing countries such as India, where operational costs are naturally lower as compared to that of developed countries such as the US and the UK. India's outsourcing companies are thus in a better position to achieve, sustain and deliver the desired cost savings.

Apart from cost savings, outsourcing companies also deliver many other benefits such as process optimization, efficiency improvements and value additions. The best part is that all of these can be achieved and delivered without compromising on the quality of offered contact center services. Customer satisfaction can thus be maximized with the least possible costs and efforts. Once that is achieved, businesses can look forward to creating business competencies that have become a necessity for ensuring both success and survival in today's age of Globalization.

In most cases, hiring offshore contact center services certainly helps achieve the targeted goals and objectives. However, since success depends a lot on the actual performance, it would be better if businesses check out the track record of available outsourcing companies. The stakes are often high and it would be wise to hire the services of the best available contact center outsourcing company.

Outsourced call centers: Is money the only motivator?

Like any profit-driven company, Largo, Md.-based Liberty Wireless wanted to cut costs when it elected to outsource its contact center. But, as surprising as it may sound, improved customer service was also a motivator for sending work outside the company.

"It was more than just cost," said Don Charlton, Liberty's president. "We thought we could get a better level of service for what we were paying."

Liberty divided up its call center work. It outsourced call center functions like call routing, interactive voice response (IVR) and automatic bill payment to Mountain View, Calif.-based BeVocal Inc., a managed call automation provider. Agents man Liberty's call center from the Philippines, a country expected to triple its contact center capacity this year to 60,000 seats.

"In certain instances it makes sense to have [the call center] all in one shop, but it also makes sense not to be dependent on one provider [for] too many core functions," Charlton said. For instance, having different providers for IVR and the call center prevents the outsourcer from steering more traffic to live agents, where it makes more money.

While it's still too early in the outsourcing process for Liberty to calculate the benefits, the company hopes to cut its call center costs in half and improve service. Still, not everyone buys the argument that outsourcing is good for service.

"You're kidding, right?" said John Ragsdale, research director with Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research. "I would still say the driving force [for outsourcing] is cost cutting."

In fact, a 2002 Datamonitor study found that a 150-seat call center that costs $5.6 million to run annually in the U.S. costs just $2.2 million when operated in India.

Yet, some companies turn to outsourcing as an easy fix. Ragsdale said that many companies that outsource do a poor job of monitoring customer service internally. An outsourcer may be able to reduce the average answer speed or cut down on call times, but often customers are more interested in getting an agent that speaks fluent English and having their problem resolved on the first call.

High-volume call centers often find it beneficial to turn to outsourcers to handle their overflow, according to Ragsdale. For instance, they keep calls requiring a great deal of training in-house and outsource simpler inquiries, where expertise is less important.

Convergys Corp., a Cincinnati-based contact center outsourced provider, said outsourcing's savings are so significant that high-level executives are increasingly involved in the decision to offload the work. And it insists that cost cutting isn't the only reason to do so.

"We believe we can increase things such as first-call resolution and customer satisfaction," said Bill Rieke, director of Convergys' customer management group. "We can reduce your cost by reengineering some of the process flow."

Rieke said his customers are focused more than ever on improving service and have placed a greater emphasis on strategic metrics to track gains.

If companies are sold on outsourcing, Ragsdale recommends that they identify service levels early on and include them in the contract. He said it's wise to begin with outsourcing peak volume to determine the outsourcer's service level.

"The key is all in the contract," Ragsdale said. "There's a huge amount of work you have to do. It's understanding the current service level, the current customer experience and working with the outsourcer, making sure they can meet those demands."

Outsourced call centers maintain growth

The North American market for outsourced customer service operations is expected to continue along a steady growth path, according to recent research by Frost & Sullivan Inc.

The San Antonio-based research and consulting firm states that the market reached $19.5 billion in revenues in 2005 and is likely to reach $20.1 billion by 2012. Call center agent attrition, companies' continuing to adjust to the Do Not Call legislation, and greater specialization by North American outsourcers are driving the market, according to Michael DeSalles, Frost & Sullivan's industry analyst for the communications practice.

"Call centers are the tip of spear. In a lot of places, it's the only place [the] customer touches the company," DeSalles said. "For some companies, they find that's not their core competency, that's for someone else. An outsourcer can do it cheaper or better. If you're not doing a good job or at least on par with companies with good contact centers, you're at a competitive disadvantage."


Also, the backlash by North American consumers over jobs sent overseas is helping to bolster the on-shore and near-shore outsourcing markets.

The market for North American customer service outsourcing is a fragmented one, with literally thousands of providers. According to Frost & Sullivan, however, it is dominated by fewer than a dozen major, global outsourcers.

The market is growing, but outsourcers are also under increasing pressure to do more than just increase efficiencies. Clients expect outsourced call centers to improve retention, and loyalty as well.

"The way to measure that is not by handle time, which was the prevailing metric," DeSalles said. "Now we're looking at first-call resolution."

Outsourcers are also conducting post-call surveys, measuring the number of transfer calls and up-selling and cross-selling.

Consolidation in the market has also provided companies with the ability to mix and match their outsourced call center needs, using some offshore, some near-shore and some internal resources. The growth of work-at-home agents, who can access CRM systems through Web-based interfaces and phone systems through Voice over Internet Protocol, is also providing outsourcers with a greater talent pool, while reducing facility costs.

Offshore Outsourcing Driving Contact Center Growth in Asia Pacific

Despite the negative press that the term off shoring tends to generate, the reality is that we are a global economy and many companies can maximize customer service operations by considering facilities in another country. One such country that is enjoying considerable contact center growth is that of the Asia Pacific.

Growth consulting firm Frost & Sullivan has produced new analysis that points to low labor cost, increasing competition, globalization, increased IP (Internet Protocol) adoption and improved network infrastructure as driving the contact center outsourcing market in Asia Pacific.

While high growth in both domestic and offshore outsourcing is expected in the coming years, offshore outsourcing is anticipated to drive a majority of that growth. Customer service and technical support services in the banking, telecommunications and technology sectors are on the rise and will likely fuel this growth.

According to the report from Frost & Sullivan, the Asia Pacific industry, which covers 13 major Asia Pacific economies, produced revenues of US $7.2 billion in 2005 and estimates indicate that the industry will be worth US $25.1 billion by the end 2012.

Frost & Sullivan industry analyst Shivanu Shukla, offered that offshore outsourcing is a global phenomenon that has driven growth in the contact center outsourcing market in Asia-Pacific and expects to continue to be the key driver for growth. Proximity to the West, cultural similarities within Asia Pacific and increased focus on outsourcing and offshoring by the governments in Asia Pacific are all expected to boost growth.

US companies using India as a back-office hub for their administrative functions has led the offshore outsourcing trend. Many enterprises today from not only the US, but also the UK have outsourced significant portions of their customer care functions to countries such as the Philippines and India. Contact center outsourcing contacts serviced out of the Asia Pacific region from these two countries has represented more than US $2.17 billion in 2005.

Shukla noted that as the contact center market in Asia Pacific continues to return strong growth, the demand for skilled agents increases in tandem. Since employment as a contact center agent is not perceived as a great career option in most parts of the region, available talent pools are lacking. In addition, inadequate compensation and incentives are leading to higher attrition and agents tend to move fast within the industry.

Frost & Sullivan recommends that outsources offer structured career paths and better incentives to reduce attrition. The firm also highlighted the need to train and coach agents and leaders in order to build a strong middle management team as a necessity to retain employees.

Data security and customer information issues have been a key area of concern for customers and companies alike and as a result, outsourcers in India and other offshore destinations are implementing stringent measures to ensure that data security is maintained. ISO and COPC (Customer Operations Performance Center) certifications, along with Six Sigma processes are gradually being adopted by outsourcers to increase the confidence level of customers and enterprises that outsource their customer information to the Asia Pacific region.

Contact Center Outsourcing Services

Customer Care Support balances improved customer satisfaction with reduced operation costs in handling various post-sale interactions including complex product and service inquiries, data privacy and security breaches, fraud management, crisis management, billing and credit issues, and product returns and reverse logistics.
People – Our people are the most important component of our approach. Our contact centers around the world are staffed with experienced, results-oriented teams that drive agent productivity and operational innovation. You will find a highly skilled global technology staff who ensure that daily operations remain stable and reliable. We also have recruiting processes that select, train, and retain the best customer service professionals to maintain and improve customer satisfaction. Our agents are further supported through focused training and retention programs that increase agent effectiveness.
Process – Around the world, our contact centers combine our globally consistent, customer operations performance center (COPC) compliant delivery processes with our standard technology infrastructure expertise to help you achieve your customer-focused goals. By clearly measuring the effectiveness of our processes both quantitatively and qualitatively, we provide the operational discipline to effectively manage operations within an individual contact center, across multiple sites or multiple geographies.

Technology – The technology component is a key enabler of the people and process components. Our global leveraged technology platform is built using products from key alliance partners and provides your business with superior functionality, reliability, scalability and security. Its advanced routing capability ensures customers are segmented by value and connected to the appropriate resource the first time, regardless of the interaction channel chosen by the customer.

Quality- All three of these components are strengthened by a Quality System that we have developed over the last decade and continues to enhance globally. Our Quality System is our set of management practices to ensure that our services, products, and solutions are reliably designed, delivered and supported at the claimed quality levels and continuously improved to meet changing customer and business requirements. To support the Quality System, we provide a comprehensive integrated framework comprised of dozens of market recognized best practices, regulation and standards. These Quality components are woven into the fabric of our global common processes to enable consistent delivery of services while complying with international standards for quality, security, privacy, and service management that protect the interests of our clients and their customers.

Offshoring by US companies surges: Survey

WASHINGTON: US companies are increasingly turning to off shoring their functions to achieve cost savings, and few plan to bring those jobs back to
IT
Top Indian outsourcing cos
Nine trends for IT in 2009
Cities that are IT hubs
the United States, the Conference Board said Monday.

The number of US companies with a corporate off shoring strategy in place more than doubled in the past three years, according to the fifth annual report on off shoring trends, published by Duke University in collaboration with the Conference Board.

Of the companies surveyed, 53 per cent had a corporate off shoring strategy in place, up from 22 per cent in 2005, said the Conference Board, a nonprofit business research organization.

"Sixty per cent of companies that had already offshore say they have aggressive plans to expand existing activities, and very few plan to relocate activities back to the United States," it said.

Does Outsourcing Really Add Jobs To The US Economy ?

We've all seen the headlines: Outsourcing America; John Kerry Says He'll Put an End to "Off-shoring" US Jobs. Are Too Many US Jobs Going Overseas? But have we really stopped to look at the benefits of working with offshore companies?

In just over one year since Tele-Sales Force, Inc. began operations and subsequently launched TSF Call Center, Tele-Sales Force, Inc. has signed up over 25 customers including Sun Micro systems and People Soft, added more than a dozen US jobs (Executive Team, Controller, Legal Counsel, Sales Professionals, etc.) and perhaps most importantly, helped other US companies increase sales dramatically. According to Stephen Polinski of Genuine, "Tele-Sales Force, Inc. helped us understand our target market better, developed a value- based sales message, and then executed the telesales campaign. In just a few weeks, we closed a transaction worth $86,000 to our company."

Chad Burmeister, Co-Founder and CEO of Tele-SalesForce, Inc. said, "Just like enterprise software helped companies throughout the 1990's to reduce costs by millions, improve efficiencies, and help companies compete, Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) will become the next buzzword for the remainder of this decade. In our first year of operations, our company has proven that by taking a socially responsible approach to outsourcing, and focusing on jobs that US workers typically don't do as effectively, or do not want to do at all, we can add new jobs to the US Economy, not take them away." Mr. Burmeister also said, "We hired one local Account Executive that made about 100 telesales calls in the 10 months he worked with us. Our offshore telesales agents make more than 100 outbound telesales calls every day."

Additional value created by TSF includes: Identified and scheduled conference calls with decision makers at thousands of auto dealers which led to more than $800,000 in sales; provided 24 hour instant message support for a bank in Arizona to help them compete with B of A and other large banks; enabled at least three US companies to start a business using TSF call center as the backbone of their telesales operations; partnered with one US based call center in the past 60 days and already sold 2 seats for them.

The Scoreboard: Net US jobs lost: 0. Net US jobs gained

About TSF Call Center - TSF Call Center , world class call center, world class results, helps companies build a successful marketing campaign, monitor the campaign, and insure the best possible results. Additional services include complete outbound telesales campaigns, inbound call center support, and other back office services such as instant messaging, email support, and claims processing. The company is based in Southern California, has a sales office in Scottsdale, Arizona, a call center in Philadelphia, PA and a 350+ seat call center in Calcutta, India.