The Positive Side of Outsourcing

I received an interesting comment from Steve Hamrin regarding my previous post about the alleged horrors of Comcast's outsourced call center. Steve wrote:

"Outsourcers need to find a better sales story and commit themselves to selling a better product. We should be showing customers the way to improve customer satisfaction and improve results, and still reap some savings along the way. As long as the whole process is slanted strictly towards cost and not towards real customer satisfaction, process improvement and value, we'll keep hearing these sorry tales."

Some Outsource call centers do have a positive story to tell, if they will do the homework and share it. Our group was recently asked to perform an audit of service quality for a company who outsources most of their calls while maintaining an in-house call center. The outsource company utilized two different centers along with at-home agents. We provided a side-by-side comparison of service quality delivered by the outsourced centers and the companies in-house call center.

The results of the audit revealed that there was a measurable difference in service across the centers. However, at least one of the outsourced call centers actually performed better than the companies in-house call center.

This particular outsource company does have a positive story to tell. Perhaps more reputable outsource call centers will do objective audits of their service delivery in order to market service quality as a selling point along with high call volumes and low cost-per-call.