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Outsourcing:
Feedback from
Outsourcers and Their Customers
by
Craig Bailey
This is the eighth
article in our series on maximizing outsourcer relationships. The
prior edition covered the topic of ensuring your outsourcer
effectively represents your brand or image to the market-place and your
customer.
Since the publication of our last newsletter, we've had the pleasure of
delivering a talk on "Partnering with your Outsourcer" to an audience made
up of outsourcers and customers of outsourcers. The material covered in
this talk included much of the content published in the last several
editions of our newsletter. With that said, we thought it would be worthy
to share some of the "ah-has" heard from outsourcers and clients of
outsourcers at this conference.
The biggest "ah-ha" was that of an outsourcer customer indicating that "I
now realize that I [a senior executive from the customer's firm] am over
half the problem with the relationship we have with our outsourcer." This
acknowledgement resulted from the observation that most outsourcing
arrangements are consummated and implemented with significant executive
involvement. Then, shortly thereafter, executives disengage and only get
involved when there is a problem. However, this insightful person
recognized the fact that many of the problems that had materialized
resulted from a lack of information being provided to the outsourcer from
which the outsourcer could effectively respond and react – in advance,
rather than being surprised.
Another major "ah-ha" was the realization by many of the outsourcer
customers that they weren't taking advantage of their outsourcer as a
voice of their customers. While the outsourcing firm interfaces with its
client's customers every day and has a perspective on the customer
experience and satisfaction, many of these clients firms have never asked
their outsourcer for input or perception of the customer experience and
what could change to improve the situation. Too frequently, they simply
viewed the outsourcer as an entity to direct and they hadn't proactively
asked the outsourcer to provide perspective or specific customer feedback
on how things could be improved.
One of the topics covered in a prior edition of our newsletter, which was
discussed in this conference, related to establishing win-win SLAs. More
specifically, we discussed how to reward the outsourcer for achieving or
over-achieving SLAs. That is, it can be difficult, if not impossible, to
reward (at least financially) an outsourcer for achieving (isn't that what
they were hired to do) or over-achieving the established SLAs. One
audience member suggested that an approach he had found to be truly
effective was that of committing to the outsourcer that as long as they
over-achieved (met some level of exceptional performance standard) that
their contract would NOT be put out for a competitive bid. Now there is a
creative approach to ensure you keep the outsourcer's attention on
over-achieving.
In closing, if you'd like an objective perspective on how effectively your
outsourcers are representing you in the marketplace, give us a call. We
would be happy to perform a situational assessment, providing you a
read-out of what is working well (to keep doing), opportunities for
improvement and a pragmatic road-map for closing the gap between where you
are and where you want to be. Alternatively, if you are considering
outsourcing as an approach to addressing key business needs, we can help
you evaluate options (including the basic question: does outsourcing even
make sense for us?), consummating the relationship through implementing
the standard operating practices to ensure an ongoing and effective
relationship. In fact, we have the references to prove it!
View previous articles in this series.
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Contents
+ Outsourcing: Feedback from Outsourcers and Their
Customers
+ Recommended Reading
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Recommended Reading
This issue's
recommended reading is CRM Magazine article
Implement CRM or Become Customer-Centric? by Dick Lee. Mr. Lee
emphasizes that CRM alone will not help companies serve their customers
better. Rather, CRM has to include a company-wide shift in
customer-centric strategy.
About Customer Centricity, Inc.
We strengthen overall company performance through
better service delivery and management.
We boost efficiencies in front-line customer service and technical support
teams, order processing, fulfillment, field service, logistics and other
key operations functions.
In short, we align the resources of your organization to exceed your
customers' expectations in the most effective and efficient manner
possible.
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