Business Process Outsourcing – “Navigating the path to effective external service delivery”
Business process outsourcing has received some bad press recently. A number of high-profile contact center and other process outsourcing programs have proved to be more costly and lower performing than had been anticipated.
This may not seem that surprising since there are a lot of things to address when embarking on an outsourcing journey, but by planning for and addressing a number of key factors, it is possible to have a successful contact center outsourcing program. In fact, a characteristic of successful outsourcing programs is that these factors are addressed and planned for early in the process, which results in an achievable plan roadmap and commercial terms, which are understood and agreed by all parties.
Some of those key factors are:
- The type of outsourcing to be undertaken – “lift and shift” versus some operational change versus full-scale transformational outsourcing
- The transition from current state to outsourced model – how long will it take? How will it be accomplished?
- The extent of “re-badging” of your staff to the outsourced vendor
- The level and complexity of any transformation
- When will that transformation occur? Before, during or after the transition to the outsourced model?
- The chosen locations of the outsourced operations? On-shore? Near-shore? Offshore?
- Training and cultural impacts
- The structure of the outsourcing agreement – the level of partnership with the vendor? Will there be “co-sourcing” of some roles?
- The selection, approach and choice of vendor – ensuring a match to your values, culture and needs
- Program governance, reporting and accountability of the vendor
- The metrics to be used to measure success – including their reasonableness and achievability
- Short-term – SLAs
- Longer term – improvements over time in terms of cost reduction, quality improvement, customer experience improvement and revenue growth
- The measurement system for metrics – it must be fully agreed upon as to how metrics will be measured up-front
Addressing these factors and planning for their resolution at appropriate points in the process will help smooth the planning for, and transition to an outsourcing model and reduce possible contention between you and your outsourcing partner.
Method and tool support
Our C-SOAR™ method provides significant support for the transformational stage of a business process outsourcing engagement. The strategy and assessment (S&A) component of the method enables assessments and strategy engagements in this area. The A3D component of the method supports the full-lifecycle of engagements from analysis through to deployment.
In addition, our RCM Model provides significant support for contact center, sales and marketing operations.
The C-SOAR™ tool supports the method and enables our consultants to capture engagement specific information consistently and effectively.
How we can help support your process outsourcing needs
ThoughtBurst can help you meet your business objectives in the business process outsourcing area. We can help you:
- Develop an approach to outsourcing some or all of your customer-focused operations (contact center, sales, marketing)
- Improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your current outsourced operations
- Understand whether outsourcing could provide a compelling value proposition for your customer facing operations
- Improve the customer experience associated with your current or planned outsourced operations
- Better evaluate the performance of your outsourced operations
- Better understand the options available to you in outsourcing and their impact and likely business case – shared services, outsourcing, partial outsourcing, off-shoring, near-shoring, on-shoring, crowd-sourcing or retain in-house and improve efficiency/effectiveness
Our business process outsourcing services
We can bring skills to bear in this complex area relating to a range of services including:
- Business Process outsourcing strategy (could be a “should we?” or “how do we?” or both)
- Business process outsourcing assessment
- Outsourcer criteria development & selection
- Outsourcer contract negotiation
- Outsourcing metrics and measures development
- Business process outsourcing business process design
- Business process outsourcing program management
- Business process outsourcing vendor management
- Business process outsourcing portfolio management