Multiple service center locations cross-trained and able to ramp up for temporary volume spikes, or as mitigation pertaining to disaster recovery, is smart business and well worth the financial impact.  Your customers expect service, and in today’s global world, that service is often required to be 24/7.  To meet the demands of your customers in this ever-changing world, multiple service centers enable the selection of a larger, better educated workforce and in some cases, without the risks of labor arbitrage associated with putting your eggs in only one or limited geographic baskets. 

By diversifying your labor pool across either multiple service centers, or multiple vendors, your company can leverage human capital in multiple timezones, and provide adequately staffed workforces should temporary situations such as connectivity loss, or in longer term situations due to geopolitical or physical events.

Multiple service centers allow also for:

• Human capital.  In this day and age, your labor pool isn’t limited to Birmingham, but rather Bangalore, Boston and Bacolod City.
• Diversified risk.  A typhoon in Manila’s effects on Mumbai is highly unlikely.
• Overflow.  Cross-training agents in multiple service centers, coupled with strong workforce management enable agents in other locations to meet volume demands, occasionally unforeseen.

From a cost perspective, redundancy costs money.  Utilizing one vendor in multiple locations is generally deemed more cost-effective than multiple vendors in multiple locations, as the overall volume to one vendor provides leverage in terms of price.  While systems redundancy is now the accepted norm, many companies do not yet realize the value of human capital redundancy, often until it’s too late.

In the Tier 1 Call Center space, the Philippines has proven to be an excellent location for outsourcing.  Generally speaking, acceptable political stability (excepting Mindanao in the far South), a large population of English speakers with a far less discernible accent than India or elsewhere in the developing world, and a large base of college-educated adults that are otherwise under-employed.  However, many if not most of the outsourcing vendors in the Philippines are in the general vicinity of Manila.  And Manila is prone to typhoons that can and have on occasion wreaked havoc on the population and infrastructure.  The point to be made here is this - if all of your outsourcing services are conducted in either one center, or one general geograhic location, your company and by extension your customers are at conceivably great risk.  Diversification of physical locations will allow for better Disaster Recovery procedures to be implemented, as if a typhoon hits Manila and a service center goes offline due to power failure or the inability of folks to get to work, then services may be shifted to another center elsewhere not affected by the calamity in Manila. 

Contracts with  service providers should include provisions for such force majeure conditions, and specify timelines as to when services must be back up and running, even at diminished capacity, based upon the shift of services to other non-affected locations.  The idea here is that services must be performed, and therefore the service provider must have capacity as well as (at least) minimally trained staff elsewhere to perform services and meet service levels.  Obviously, this all sounds good and makes sense in a perfect world, however, cost constraints often dictate the ability of a company to require such strong force majeure and disaster recovery dictates.  Alas, Mother Nature or Father Politics remain a part of our world, and thus when spreading our business to disparate locales, there’s a case to be made for the cost benefit analysis between increased cost and the guarantee of services performed to lower cost and the threat of service outage.  The impact to customers, and your company, may make the risk too great to bear.