Jananas

I’ve watched a lot of outsourcing happen within businesses. As a customer I’ve had plenty of bad experiences (although to be fair, I probably couldn’t tell you how many good experiences I’ve had as those would have been too similar to a non-outsourced experience to identify). Overall, I’m not a huge fan of outsourcing. I have found that, more often than not, companies rush to outsource because they see the initial cost savings. The increased costs and time associated with management of the outsourced provider tend to downplayed. I believe that this is dangerous given how important things like quality assurance and customer experience are to a business’ long term survival.

Here’s an example from a previous life that illustrates what can happen when outsourcing doesn’t work out quite the way that you’ve planned…

Customer: I’d like to report a car accident.

Insurance CSR: What happened sir?

Customer: I hit black ice.

CSR: Sir, ice is white.

The problem in this particular case was that the CSR was in India and the customer was in Canada. The phenomenon of black ice occurring in the winter was something that an individual in a more tropical client would have never encountered. In this particular case, the CSR had no way or personal experience that would help them understand that this situation was indeed a valid reason for a car accident. And while we can rationally understand this, as a customer who has just been in a car accident the overall result is a company who isn’t able to help him.

With outsourcing, a lot of time and effort is put into training the CSRS. Training on accents so that they sound more like the country calls are originating from. Training to help the CSRS make sense of cultural differences. The problem here is that cultural training is only as good as the person defining the potential scenarios that could happen. This person also has to have an in depth understanding of both cultures, otherwise cultural differences can impact the quality of service (through no one’s fault other than the initial decision to move the service provider).

I know that I write a lot about customer experience. Its because I believe that it vital to long term success of your business. You may have to spend more money in the short term (i.e. more testing before you launch, a better designed product, etc.), but I believe that such investments pay off in the longer term. Better products today mean more satisfied customers (as an aside, they also mean easier product launches in the future and therefore save money on development down the line). Customers who are more satisfied and who have good interactions with the company (and these can still be good even when the situation that caused them isn’t) become loyal customers. And loyal customers don’t need to be bribed to stay or threatened with contracts. They will stick with you in rough patches and recommend you to friends.

And that’s why you need to be careful when you outsource. Because business isn’t just about tomorrow’s revenues, its about revenues 25 years down the line.