How to Overcome the Challenges of Outsourcing in CX

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CONTENTS INTRODUCTION THE POSITIVE IMPACT UNDERSTANDING THE CONS OVERCOMING THE CHALLENGES 5 TOP TIPS FOR CX LEADERS CONCLUSION

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INTRODUCTION

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Given today’s competitive market, investing in in-house staff to handle customer experience needs can become a financial burden for many companies. Thus, resorting to outsourcing, either locally or internationally can make a big difference. However, the biggest hurdle in this process is perhaps the limited control you’ll have over a team who might be miles away from you, making it difficult to relay information effectively or discuss matters immediately. Still, outsourcing customer experience is proving popular with companies across industries, so just what do CX professionals need to know before they embark on a similar journey? With top tips from Coca-Cola, SEB and Brady Corp, this eBook looks at the benefits as well of the drawbacks of outsourcing your CX efforts. Focusing on how to overcome the challenges, where to outsource and exactly how to get the most out of your strategy, CX Network presents: A Customer Experience Guide to Overcoming the Challenges of Outsourcing.

THE POSITIVE IMPACT Outsourcing your customer experience can bring a handful of benefits: 1. Reduced Operational Expenses You’ll reduce your company’s expenditures in terms of cost for office space, salary compensation, hiring process, and tech tools needed by employees. According to Duane Craig of Tech Republic, it can save you from purchasing analytics tools or subscriptions needed for sustaining your competitive advantage. Focusing on one part of customer experience as an example, leveraging social media has always been a trial-and-error marketing strategy. You can’t guarantee its success at all times. So, if it doesn’t pan out the way you’ve expected, you can easily terminate your agreement with an outsourced agency.

2. More Time To Focus On Your Goals If you hire someone to manage certain aspects of customer experience strategies, you and your colleagues will have an ample amount of time to focus

on achieving your goals. You can use your free time on brainstorming and working on your future product releases. Moreover, you can also enhance your customers’ satisfaction by conducting thorough experimentations on your products and/or services, before offering them to the public. Having a team dedicated solely to the progression of your customer experience initiative round the clock can greatly impact the relationship you have with your consumers.

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UNDERSTANDING THE CONS Outsourcing your customer experience can bring its own challenges: 1.

Inconsistency Of Experiences

The worst-case scenario with the practice of outsourcing is that your customer experience ends up becoming “inconsistent” across your various channels. No consumer will ever like an inconsistent company. However this catastrophe can be avoided if you carefully plan and entrust your account to a brand ambassador who is well-versed in every aspect of your business. A great way to do this is to establish goals from the offset that should be maintained and worked towards. Plans should also be set up and roles distributed fairly to make sure a consistent interaction is maintained.

2. Less Control, Greater Risk When you delegate tasks, you should also be ready for possible problems or mishaps along the process, which are inevitable. Continuing with the earlier example of social media, if you are not the one updating your Twitter and Facebook feeds, you can’t filter the

content pushed to your followers. What if the firm or a freelancer you hire posts something controversial on social media? What if they leak your upcoming products/patents, or worse, sell them to your competitors? In any aspect of outsourcing your CX, a proven way to mitigate this risk is to lay out a black-and-white confidentiality agreement with the outsourcing

company which will hopefully lessen the risk of any problems going forward.

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OVERCOMING THE CHALLENGES 1. Outsourcing customer experience is a relentless pursuit. There isn’t an end game. It’s about achieving ongoing improvement of your function and the business in order to benefit the business as a whole. Small steps are a good thing, over time the understanding of the whole business of customer

experience will grow and it will become an integrated part of your culture. But it takes time.

2. Accepting that outsourcing is not a silver bullet . No doubt improvements will be made which will in turn help you to understand the health of your organisation and help you think about ways to improve it. However, you will still need to make some decisions in house and learning to deal with this ambiguity is an important skill for cx professionals going forward. 5

Where to outsource: In today's "flat world" scenario, the options are frighteningly broad: you can leverage technology and automation to offset the higher labour cost of being onshore; you can take advantage of cultural affinity and languages while benefiting from lower-cost resources near shore; or you can go big offshore, with all of the pros and cons associated with that option. The decision as to where to go hinges, therefore, on your organisation's cost tolerance, the importance of language variety, time zone, talent pool, and technical skills in demand. To further complicate this decision, numerous locations will offer lucrative incentives, whether through taxation, subsidies in training employees, or rent.

Anyone who's done it before will tell you that basing your decision on current cost alone, however, will be a mistake. With shared services effectively reinventing their value proposition every 3 to 5 years, you may find that the cost of an office space or of an employee becomes less relevant as the need to offer knowledge-based service or the 5 ability to leverage automation increases.

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Data In terms of data quality and access to the right data, it is important to get your own workforce data in order. Data has to be cleaned and structured. You also need to think about what kind of questions need to be answered. Over time you will also want to start looking at other sources of data throughout the organisation that may correlate with workforce data to highlight relationships that could be improved between the internal workforce and the external outsourcing team.

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Presenting you work to decision makers A huge part of beginning the process of outsourcing is convincing your colleagues that there’s value in journeying down that path. Keep things simple and rather than just showing them what the problem is, include what the solutions might be. Making evidence-based proposals is a great way to gain buy-in for all strategies.

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5 TOP TIPS FOR CX LEADERS CX Network spoke with Ruta Jaslulloniene, HR Business Partner at Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken AB, Mohan Caers, EMEA HR Shared Services

Leader at Brady Corp and David Lamy the Director of Global HR Shared Services at Coca-Cola; to find out what their top tips for outsourcing are:

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Map the processes and aims of your outsourcing strategy. What do you hope to achieve by partnering with an external company? Describe clear and reasonable requirements towards staff and hire managers to ensure your brand is represented accurately every step of the way. Having the right mind set from the beginning is the key to successfully outsourcing any part of your customer experience. There should be a sufficient level of transparency between both organisations to ensure nothing gets lost in translation. To ensure your initiative is successful, define a clear and compelling business case and stick to it. Otherwise you may find yourself at the end of the outsourcing journey with your customers not knowing why outsourcing was considered in the first place. Nothing is worse than a badly outsourced customer experience. It is important to assess your company’s change capability and work out an acceptable speed of change. Some organisations benefit from a paced transformation to outsourcing which starts with process design and harmonisation, while others may consider a lift and shift tactic. Investing in educating the outsourcing team in the aims of your customer experience and the value of your brand is a great way to ensure consistency across all touch points. For some companies, retaining the current team and structure they already had prior to outsourcing for a certain period after the go live date has helped to ensure the new team have the right level of support post implementation.

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CONCLUSION Customers are changing their behaviour faster than companies can evolve their business models, operational processes, and technology platforms. As a result, companies are changing their organisational structures and technology platforms that hinder delivering compelling customer experience. Outsourcing has its advantages and disadvantages and it should not be ruled out by CX professionals who want to win through their customer experience in 2016.

ABOUT CX NETWORK CX Network is an online resource providing value-rich content such as customer experience management trends, best practice, latest industry news, interviews with CX leaders and so much more! Our focus on the content that matters to customer experience leaders most, allows us to cut through the white noise that surrounds this everchanging subject, and makes us the primary resource for CX executives to turn to. Visit us here.

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