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Governance: Trust, but Verify
After every holiday, 1-800-Flowers reviews how the outsourced call center operations fared. Did the operators convert calls into sales at the expected rate? Were the staffing targets met? Was call length in line with expectations? But the company also verifies performance on an ongoing basis. Transactions are monitored in real time. And there are weekly calibration sessions, where the company's vendors and quality assurance staff jointly monitor calls and compare notes.
"We want to be on the same page with grading," Orsi says. "Before, we saw they were grading the same call as a 90, and we were grading it as a 70. Now when we say we have an issue with X, they know exactly what we're talking about." The company, moreover, handles the training of the outsourced staff. "We've done it both ways," Orsi says. "We found it a lot easier to provide the trainer and do it ourselves."
Good governance makes for good partnerships. Service-level agreements (SLAs) should spell out performance targets and metrics as well as financial incentives and penalties.
"Governance tends to be an afterthought," says Lepeak. "Governance is important. You're touching a customer. Does the SLA or contract cover everything? You can be managing at the service level and still not have a happy customer."
But Verma says that effective governance also involves a commitment among high-level management to work on the relationship. "Your key people always have to manage it," he says. "Your customers are too important not to."
Sealock adds the SLA should include a compensation scheme that reinforces the company's priorities, whether it is promoting efficiency, generating sales or ensuring quality. "The most successful outsourcing partnerships blur the line between the outsourcer and outsourcee," he notes. "Start inculcating the outsource employees just like they were part of the company. They get a paycheck from the outsourcer, but they should feel like they are working for the company."
Orsi agrees. For 1-800-Flowers, the idea is that a customer can't tell an in-house facility from an outsourced one. "We're looking for consistency for how clients are handled," Orsi says. "We want to make sure if you contact one of our internal call centers or an outsourced one you'll get the same level of experience."
Michael Ybarra is a contributing writer for SearchCIO-Midmarket.com. Write to him at editor@ciodecisions.com.
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