Choosing a Contact Centre Outsourcer

Choosing an outsourcer for your contact centres requires a considered and conscientious approach. Essentially when you are selecting someone to operate your customer or client contact you are choosing a face for your business, a service that will reflect on your brand. As such this decision needs to be based on fact rather than supposition.

One of the first questions you should ask any potential outsourced contact centres provider is about their previous and existing clients. Fundamentally it is by understanding how the provider treats their existing clients that it will be possible to gain an idea of the effectiveness of their services. It can also be worth asking the contact centre provider whether they can offer references and examples of their work in your specific industry sector, this can highlight how they implement industry specific strategies and demonstrate their success at maintaining working relationships.

It is worth remembering that choosing a contact partner is a big step for any business. The benefits are myriad, but only if your partner has the ability to implement contact solutions that you require. A contact centre should typically offer services along the lines of:

* Customer Services (including after sales support and advice)
* Technical Support (in accordance with your products and services
* Outbound Telemarketing (in both B2B and B2C sectors as lead generation
* Customer retention and relationship management (to develop customer loyalty)

These services are only a small cross section of what can be offered but give an idea of what a contact centre provider should be capable of.

When choosing your partner for outsourcing contact centres it is also a good idea to visit the facilities at their disposal. It is only by seeing them in action that it is possible to ascertain the services on offer, at this stage looking at training programmes, staff management and the technology being utilised will provide valuable insight into how your customer or client contact will be administered. It should also give an idea of how they intend to communicate with your company representatives and how they may instigate any of your campaigns or programmes. More general points to look for in a contact centre outsourcer include financial stability, effective service level agreements and metrics within SLAs that are suitable and appropriate.

Choosing an outsourcer is about finding a partner with whom it is possible to build a solid and effective working relationship. Get this choice wrong and you could be sacrificing your reputation with customers and clients; get this choice right however and your company stands to receive significant operational and financial benefits

How Customer Insight Can Improve Customer Relationships

It has been established in previous blogs just how instrumental customer insight is to today’s marketers in the creation of marketing campaigns. However, it should be noted that it is only through effective and thorough database management that it is possible to take advantage of the greater customer insight and make this knowledge work for greater profits.

Customer insight is only one side of the coin, after all having and using the knowledge of customer behaviour are entirely different processes. Essentially it is the ability to make sense of the data that results from customer insight projects that leads to more effective business relationships.

One way in which this is possible is by compiling data that around customers’ order lag. The frequency of orders is a vital piece of information in understanding the patterns in which customers place orders. By studying these patterns it is possible to identify which customers are lagging in their orders and which are simply maintaining their regular ordering behaviour, subsequently indentifying the customers that could need contacting to encourage future purchasing.

It is through developing a Critical Lag formula, based upon customer ordering behaviour that it is possible to interact and communicate with customers at the right time. When this is combined with effective customer segmentation prospects can be readily identified and targeted to make the most of existing business relationships. The results of effective communication based upon a solid understanding of a customer base are less customer churn, and greater revenue generated from each customer.

Fundamentally customer insight is a highly valuable business tool. It is however only through efficient and effective database management that it is possible to make sense of the data extrapolated through customer insight activities and use this information to formulate customer relationship and retention strategies.

The Value of Customer Insight to Marketers

Customer insight is rapidly becoming a vital component in any business strategy; after all, who can afford not to know who their customers are, how they behave and how their loyalty can be assured? Put simply customer insight employs the collection, analysis and use of data, allowing businesses to create customer acquisition, development and retention strategies.
Customer insight can play a massively important role in planning and implementing marketing campaigns, helping marketers to extract the greatest revenue from limited marketing budgets. It does this by creating best match profiles for potential, loyal and the most profitable customers.
Fundamentally greater customer insights allows for more effective targeting. It has been a long known fact within marketing that a campaign can stand or fall on its ability to target the right type of people. A misguided campaign can be a costly mistake; conversely a well targeted campaign can court potential customers, produce profitable relationships and develop future prospects.
Understanding where targets should be focussed is only possible through in-depth analysis of data. Data is one of the most powerful tools at the marketer’s disposal and an integral element within modern customer insight services. In most cases, this data is easily accessible and gives the opportunity to identify profitable prospects, rather than pursuing customers that will provide little if any return on investment.
Existing customer data creates massive up and cross-selling opportunities. The profiles created using segmentation and modelling help to identify precisely which customers should be targeted through a greater understanding of their purchasing behaviour, the types of products they are likely to buy and an idea of their likely spend.
Understanding the behaviour of customers means marketers have the knowledge to implement campaigns that target these profiles in a very specific way, taking into account when and how they spend their money in order to extract the greatest revenue. It is this potential that attracts so many marketers to customer insight services; understandably, having the knowledge of how your customers spend their money is an extremely valuable asset in business.

Outsourcing Contact Centres – A Path to Reduced Costs?

Outsourcing has always been presented as an excellent way for companies to save money and reduce their overheads. With the current economic situation now is the time to make the most of outsourcing contact centres, eventually granting more freedom for a company to manoeuvre. But whilst using the correct outsourcer will help to save money, precisely how will outsourced contact centres reduce overall spend?

This is fairly self-explanatory but essentially, if a company reduces the amount of work it must do for its customer contact operation, requires less hardware and infrastructure and reduces the number of staff devoted to the task, they will save money. Outsourcing practically eliminates the low-value work and tasks that add up in terms of hours and cost. Fundamentally, the Service Level Agreement and metrics provided by an outsourcer offer return on investment without draining company resources indirectly.

Similarly, whilst the workload is reduced, the amount of spending needed to achieve the same or better results is also reduced. This increased efficiency per pound spent is a result of the professional set up of the outsourcer and the fact that their contact centres are filled with highly trained, dedicated customer service professionals that are highly capable and deliver predefined results.

Fundamentally, by combining these two features of outsourcing it is possible to reduce costs. These costs can be reduced by downsizing the number of people dedicated to customer service within a business; by removing the need to employ so many contact workers. In addition, the reduction in infrastructure and IT spend also reduces the investment needed in comparison to an in-house solution.

With the right outsourcing provider considerable savings can be made when it comes to running and maintaining contact centres. Vitally however, it should be recognised that reducing costs should not mean sacrificing standards, ideally an outsourcer should be able to provide services that are equal or better than what would be possible in house, at a price that is also cost effective.

Onshore vs. Offshore Contact Centres – The Real Benefits

In the past major companies made the most of utilising offshore outsourced contact centres in order to maximise profits and reduce the costs of providing customer services. The low cost solution offered by contact centres in the developing world meant that the price per minute was much lower than what had been available in the UK or “onshore”. However, whilst the offshore model is still certainly popular, there is a growing trend for bringing back contact centre services to the UK.

There are a number of reasons behind the re-emerging popularity of home based services. The largest contributing factor has to be the overwhelming customer demand for customer services and contact centres to be operated within their own country. Customer frustration is one of the major causes of this demand for change with communication problems, a lack of specific technical knowledge and an inability to effectively resolve issues topping the list of customer complaints.

Companies have now realised that the costs of customer services are not purely the management fee of a contact centre or a cost per minute for each enquiry. It has now been realised that the combined costs of offshore contact centre management, the loss of customers due to poor customer service and the increased call length due to misunderstandings makes the entire offshore customer service option less financially palatable.

Essentially, if pursuing high customer satisfaction rates then the onshore contact centre is a far better option. When combined with highly trained customer service professionals the benefits are astounding. Major UK companies have followed this route, for instance, insurance company Norwich Union announced that 150 call centre jobs would be brought back from India to be carried out in the UK whilst energy supplier Powergen has completely shut down its Indian contact centre operations in favour of UK based services.

So, whilst companies initially saw massive financial and operational benefits to outsourcing their customer services, in recent years, the popularity of offshore contact centres seems to have been stymied. With a greater understanding that customer service is less about minimising costs in the short term, and instead about forging and maintaining good customer relations as a long term goal, confidence in the UK contact centre industry has increased.

Does your CRM system give you everything you need?

EWA recently had a stand at the Data Marketing Show, part of Marketing Week Live and over the course of the two day exhibition, I had numerous conversations with people about all things data and CRM related.

One topic that kept cropping up was the failing of “off the shelf” CRM systems and the frustrations experienced by marketing personnel in particular.

“It doesn’t integrate with our email marketing software”, “I struggle to export the data in a usable format”, “We’ve had to change our processes to suit the way the system works” and “All I need is a system which I can use for mailings and allows me to keep my data up to date” were all common themes I heard. Now of course I’m sure some of the frustrations vented can be put down to what I like to call “user error” but not everyone I spoke to can be guilty of under-using or mis-using their CRM system. Which leads me to the question, are proprietary CRM systems right for everyone or have we all been a little sucked in by the hype?

A little bit of Googling returned some interesting stats to help answer the point raised.

1. In 2003, a Gartner report estimated that more than $1 billion had been spent on software that wasn’t being used.
2. In a 2007 survey, four-fifths of senior executives reported that their biggest challenge is getting their staff to use the systems they’d installed
3. 43 percent of respondents said they use less than half the functionality of their existing system
4. 72 percent indicated they’d trade functionality for ease of use
5. 51 percent cited data synchronization as a major issue

Given the facts above and the anecdotal evidence gathered during the exhibition, the answer to my earlier question has to be no, proprietary CRM systems aren’t (necessarily) right for every business and on some level, we have believed the industry hype.

This leads me on to my second point and one which addresses the other main thing I heard during the show, “if only I could have a system which just does… (Insert wish list here)”

And of course the answer is yes, you can have a bespoke CRM system which exactly matches your requirements, without all of the unnecessary functionality that you’ll never need and will have to work around.

“Hmmm, not sure about bespoke” I hear you say. “Doesn’t that mean it’ll be expensive and developed in some weird programming language?” In a word - No. In the past, bespoke, has been something of a dirty word when used in conjunction with software development. However; in just about every other circumstance, bespoke conveys a message of made to measure, quality and a precise fit which is exactly what a bespoke CRM system provides.

With the web technology available today, bespoke CRM systems can be quickly developed and deployed to multiple concurrent users giving them precisely the functionality they need, often far more cost effectively than a proprietary CRM system.

So if you’re considering a new CRM system it’s a good idea to take a look at the bespoke route, you may find it fits a little better than the off the peg version.

Should an agency be judged on more than just their results?

New business at a marketing agency can be a funny business sometimes. Part of my pitch always focuses on results as that’s primarily what any business that employs an agency like ours is looking for. But in order to get results, a good working partnership needs to be established. A great client/agency relationship leads to better insight, understanding and most importantly trust.

A call from the senior salesperson at the online marketing agency we use (and that’s quite a unique relationship, an agency using an agency) prompted this particular blog. The salesperson in question asked me to act as a reference site for a new prospect. “It’s all about conversions” he told me. “If you can focus in on that, it should clinch the deal for us”. Now I had no problem at all acting as a reference site or indeed talking to his prospective client about the excellent results they have delivered for us but personally, I rank the relationship I have with our agency as highly as I do the results.

Which led me to the question, if I didn’t get on as well with the staff who work on our account and if they didn’t have a really good understanding of our business, would we still see the results we do?

Well of course the answer is no (I’d be contradicting myself a little if it was yes!) But that led to another question… If we were getting results but they were a pain to work with, would I be looking elsewhere for another agency? And the answer to that question is probably yes. No one wants to work with an agency or indeed an individual with whom they don’t have a good relationship.

If though, the results are good and you feel you get value for money then small misdemeanours can be over-looked sometimes. Everyone makes mistakes from time to time but in my experience, it’s how you go about fixing those mistakes that really counts. If done well there is no need for a relationship to suffer and often it can become stronger as a result.

So next time you’re on the hunt for a new agency or a new business manager (like me!) is pitching to you, take a second to look beyond all the ROI metrics and ask yourself the question – “do I like this person and can I work with them?” Hopefully, if it is me in front of you, the answer will be yes!

As always, what do you think? Is it all about getting bangs for your bucks or should a good working relationship be as, if not more, important?