Over the past few years, outsourced call centers have become a whipping boy for the trouble with outsourcing. We have all seen the cartoons or the YouTube videos and we have all had similar experiences… A poor customer negotiates a maze of teleprompts and menus, is placed on hold for an extended period and finally gets to speak to someone who barely speaks the language and seems to be reciting from a written script intended to frustrate the customer.
For many products, the call center is their only point-of-contact after the sale. Consumer electronics, car insurance, banking and other products and services rely heavily on their call centers to be their primary customer point-of-contact. But when this point of contact is a frustrating mess, the company’s relationship with its customer is damaged – sometimes irrevocably.
Why does this happen? Some blame it on language and cultural differences, and largely that is true. However, simply blaming the offshored call center or the culture in that country may be a cheap-and-easy excuse intended to cover up the real problem – poor processes and controls at the customer.
Why are the processes so poor? Mostly because they are incomplete or inconsistent with the way that agents actually provide customer service. Think about it. Many call center offshorings are “lift-and-carry” operations, whereby scripts, official processes and playbooks are FedExed to a far away place. Along with some limited training, these provide the guidelines that the customer service agents follow - often to the letter.
The problem is that the “official” playbooks rarely represent what goes on “on the ground” in a service center. A quick look at an agent’s cubicle explains why. Post-it notes usually adorn the monitor, handwritten “work-arounds” are pinned to the walls and questions are lobbed back and forth between new and experienced agents - over lunch, at the water cooler, or even real-time. Sometimes, these shortcuts or workarounds just make the process smoother. Sometimes, they are in direct opposition to the official rules. They are the informal “grease” that makes the process actually work. Management frowns on these informal processes: they are rarely documented; not part of the specifications manual; and not sent to the offshore location. Once transition occurs and the domestic agents are let go, this knowledge is lost.
The instructions sent to the outsourcer are, therefore, inherently incomplete. Like an axle without grease, what was once a smooth-running process begins to seize. Fingers are pointed. Customers are unhappy. The company makes demands upon the outsourcer to reduce average handle time, increase customer satisfaction, improve first call resolution, etc. However, the outsourcer cannot change the “playbook,” and is given little flexibility to vary from the official, incomplete or inaccurate rules. The outsourcer is often powerless to improve to the process.
Of course, it would be virtually impossible to codify each post-it note on an agent’s desk or each “cheat” pinned to a wall. Furthermore, agents who are loosing their jobs are unlikely to be of much assistance. Capturing the informal “grease” is not likely possible, so another approach is necessary.
The solution might lie with the outsourcer. After all, they have hired many very smart people (they will show you their diplomas) to provide customer service. This brainpower, combined with the expertise gained from doing call centers in a variety of industries, puts your offshored call center suppliers and agents in the best place to improve the process and, most importantly, improve customer service.
Letting your outsourcer really improve your process may be the best way to supercharge your customer service operations. Better yet, let your outsourcer capture some of the financial benefit derived from the improvement. Also, get the right to roll their improvements back through your organization – helping improve all of your customer service efforts.
By aligning the interests of you and your outsourcer, your company can improve its customer service operations – and improve the relationship between your company and your customer. This is the best way to hold onto – and to grow – market share.
2 Comments
I agrre, I’v e worked in both outsourced and inhouse. Its all the same, new guys/girls get the grease, and learns how to use the mute so as they can speak with the customer, and the person trying to train them…stressful by times. Anyways its the only way it seems to work, it would take thousands more to train each agent, and turnover rates are too high to support it, so everyone says ok customer service is number one… looks the other way, says ok get them on the phones…some shit happens…but it never matters in the end, and the job gets done and everyone gets paid…but as you say peaple are getting tired of awkward phone calls and anoying delays.
The performance issues that we repeatedly see in our outsourced call centers are rooted throughout the implementation and training processes and materials that are typically used to get work offshore. The implementation process has become a virtual assembly line in which customer service reps are hired, trained and released to the production floor in a blindingly short period of time. The new reps on the floor and their management team have little context and no experience in their new jobs.
Though perhaps not a panacea, improved training may significantly improve the performance of a new customer service rep. The customer service reps that we have hired offshore have college-level educations, which implies solid inferential and problem solving skills. The training we provide, however, is geared to the learning skills of secondary education, and is based on program or product details rather than fundamentals. As a result, the new reps emerge with a vast number of facts (reinforced by scripts) that have absolutely no context. The reps can answer any question that has been directly addressed in training, but do not have the fundamental understanding to apply their knowledge to questions that were not specifically addressed in training.
A revamped approach to training, though only a part of the overall solution, should be an integral part of any new implementation. The focus of the training should be on concepts rather than facts and details. The training should be geared to college-level learning styles to challenge and engage the trainees. The new reps should emerge from the training with enough of a knowledge base to confidently reason through the issues of the caller without referring to a script or other ‘canned’ information.
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