Keeping in contact with customers
Contact Centres in-house, outsourced, onshore, near-shore, offshore
UK Contact Centre growth
“Oh – so you work in call centres … most of them have gone to India now haven’t they?” … No they have not!
The UK contact centre industry is continuing to boom despite the threat from lower cost offshore locations and grew by 6% in 2006 to represent a value to UK plc of £20.6 billion. Call centres employ a million UK workers – over 3% of the country’s working population. Analysts predict steady growth in the industry for at least another 5 years.
The boom in off shoring to India and other destinations such as South Africa and Eastern Europe has not had the negative effect on the UK call centre industry that many predicted. The amount of new work going offshore is slowing and the past 18 months has seen several high-profile companies announcing their return to the UK. Indeed you will not have missed the increase in advertising promoting UK call centres.
If it isn’t broke – don’t fix it …
… or alternatively … if it doesn’t work –
don’t outsource it!
Outsourcing and off-shoring will not paper over the cracks of poor or broken customer processes – more likely the problems will be exacerbated. Good project management disciplines and strong operational management will win through. The reported growth of UK call centres does not mean off-shoring is wrong! A couple of home truths about outsourcing and off-shoring …
If you have poor internal processes – don’t expect then to magically improve by outsourcing. You need robust processes, plus strong internal productivity and quality measurements before you outsource or you stand no chance of managing your outsourcer and delivering good service to your customers.
There are many excellent examples of offshore call centres delivering high productivity, good quality services at substantially lower cost than could be achieved in the UK. Regrettably, there are many examples of poor UK call centres as well as plenty of excellent ones.
Should one size fit all?
We would not approach a banking balance enquiry and a complex software fault in the same way … so why would we think there is a right and wrong to outsourcing and off-shoring?
The recent acquisition of major UK outsourcer TSC by Indian based Hero Group indicates the way the market is moving. The 3,000 UK workstations are being complemented (not replaced) by Hero’s Indian and US capacity to provide the appropriate mix of cost, quality and performance for the specific customer contact task and is likely to result in a client’s business being handled by an integrated global team of staff.
UK financial services companies are failing to save money and are undermining customer relationships by sending UK call centre jobs overseas, according to a recent study. The study reported sales per advisor per month in UK centres over twice the level of offshore centres. Savings from lower labour costs are disappearing as rates rise in offshore locations, with staff costs increasing by up to 15 per cent per year. Language difficulties can also lower productivity and lead to calls lasting up to twice as long as home-based operations. Listening or understanding failures occur in an average of four per cent of calls in onshore call centres but for offshore call centres, the figure rises to 18 per cent - and each of these failures can lengthen the call.
Another case study saw a large volume email service function for a major mobile telecoms provider improve customer satisfaction (response times, appropriateness of response, first contact resolution, grammatical & spelling accuracy) by 12% using an off-shore customer service team in place of a UK centre. At the same time contact handling costs were reduced by 28%.
Plenty of scope for improvement
The old metrics of wait time and abandoned calls have been (rightly) overtaken by the importance of service quality and relevance. Customers need their service expectations to be managed – but have every right to be dissatisfied if those legitimate expectations are not delivered. First contact resolution takes a much higher profile than previously … and that might be delivered by an outsourced service or an off-shore service (or both!).
Whilst transactional processes move to automated solutions, whilst some services move off-shore – other UK contact centre functions (including local government) fill the gap and provide net growth.
Appropriateness and relevance will be the key – cost will be a consequential factor.
Steve Pink is Managing Consultant at Telecommerce (www.telecommerce.co.uk) – a consultancy specialising in the development of customer contact centres. Steve is Leader of the CMA’s Contact Centres Forum.
