Offshore Outsourcing Opportunities [Paperback]

Dr. Jon Anton (Author), John Chatterley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2002

For call center executives wanting to explore and understand the benefits of offshore outsourcing, the authors have brought together ‘under one cover’ a comprehensive guide that takes the reader through each step of the complex issues of outsourcing customer service telephone calls to agents in another country. With the pressure of today’s competitive climate forcing companies to take a hard look at providing higher quality customer services at lower costs, this book is a "must read" for every call center executive.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Check out Dr. Anton’s latest book on how to take advantage of the offshore outsourcing market. -- Mark J. Eichler, OverC International, Inc.

If you are looking to understand the benefits from Offshore Outsourcing, across oceans and time zones read this book! -- Keith Fiveson Senior Partner, ITESA

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY In today’s global economy, providing world-class customer service requires the skills of a chess grandmaster. The challenges include formulating the strategies for deciding where, how, and in what manner to best meet the needs of the customers in the face of rising costs, competitive pressures, high turnover rates, and diminishing new employee skill sets. Other challenges include determining the right mixture of technology, facilities, and trained staffing to properly serve the customer without breaking the bank.

With contact center labor costs running between 50% to 70% of a total operating budget, many companies are turning to outsourcing as a cost effective strategy to bring their costs under control without sacrificing the quality of the customer services they provide.

The benefits of outsourcing customer service contacts to a customer services provider (CSP) are substantial, including fixed (and often lower) operating costs, quick ramp-up time, leveraged up-to-date technology, and ease of adapting to changing market conditions and/or services.

The benefits are greater still when outsourcing to an offshore teleservices company. Outsourcing offshore can save 5% to 8% in Canada, and 10% in Mexico for Spanish-speaking Americans, compared with domestic outsourcing. The percentages jump to 20% to 40% when outsourcing to India, the Philippines and South Africa. The higher offshore savings stem from lower wages and reduced turnover. That translates to less hiring, staffing and training expenses, plus fewer productivity lags as new agents are brought up to speed. Annual turnover rates are just 5% to 10% in India and the Philippines compared with 50% to 100% in U.S. outsourced call centers (Datamonitor Report, 2002).

Outsourcing outside the U.S. avoids the complex and costly site selection, legal, and regulatory issues involved with setting up and managing in-house call centers in other countries. When serving foreign or domestic customers, you leave it to the international CSPs to supply sufficient native language speakers and cope with unions.

An outsourcer insulates clients from having to learn, and deal with, complex and frequently changing workplace regulations. But outsourcing internationally requires extra due diligence for selecting vendors, and for ensuring contract compliance and quality service.

Outsourcing the customer experience as a function to an offshore organization that manages customer relationships as their core competency is an option that more companies are exercising. To fully understand the concept of outsourcing inbound and outbound telephone calls, or Web inquiries related to sales, customer service, and technical support, it is important to understand how businesses differentiate their products and services through the use of the contact centers.

Differentiating a service or product through the availability of high-quality customer service is a potent strategic weapon for companies in the competitive battle for market share and customer retention. It is key to remember that outsourcing is more than having someone answer your calls and respond to your e-mails. We are talking about outsourcing the total customer experience, which includes the associated data collection and analysis that provides information on which to continually act to improve the customer experience.

Most contact centers establish service parameters and targets to ensure that customers are serviced in a timely and effective manner. In contact centers, these service parameters are also referred to as key performance indicators (KPIs). Examples of KPIs include customer satisfaction ratings, service levels, speed to answer, abandonment rates, single call resolution, sales closure rate, and many more. These metrics are effective for measuring what happened yesterday, so the challenge becomes one of understanding how what happened impacts the long-term customer relationship, and what needs to be done going forward to ensure that the total customer experience is positive. Purdue University and its affiliate, BenchmarkPortal Inc., have a very large datamart of best-practice KPIs (Anton, 2000).

Product Details

• Paperback: 183 pages
• Publisher: The Anton Press (November 1, 2002)
• ISBN-10: 0971965234
• ISBN-13: 978-0971965232
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,988,932 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Did not meet expectations, March 10, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Offshore Outsourcing Opportunities (Paperback)

The book has is specifically about offshore call centers, and does not cover the broader topic of "Offshore Outsourcing". My assumption from the title was that it would cover a broader and deeper level of content, but not the case. If you are specifically looking for offshore call center topics, this is a good book.