Consulting firm recommends bringing calls back from India

A large financial services organisation is looking to save some £3m in the first year and move the ‘front office’ aspect of its customer contact centre back to the UK from its base in India.

Customer Consulting Ltd’s (CCL) Managing Director, Simon Rustom, explained: “Our research shows that the cost of running a full end-to-end customer contact centre in India – including both the ‘back office’ administration and ‘front office’ voice elements of telephone calls, emails and faxes to customers and potential customers – is some £18m a year.

“On the other hand, the cost of bringing back the ‘voice’ (front office) element of the operation to the UK, leaving the administration in India, is some £21m. However, according to our research, this results in increased customer satisfaction and higher levels of customer retention.

“Indeed, our research reveals that the cost of customers lost through using India-based contact centres is some £12m a year,” he stated.

Simon Rustom

Consequently, CCL recommended to its financial services client that the administration (back office) stayed in India but the voice element was brought back to the UK. This is because – in terms of customers retained and increased customer satisfaction – the move would more than pay for itself in just one year, and then continue to be highly profitable in subsequent years.

Rustom added: “We’ve found that these figures generally hold true, in proportionate terms, for any overseas contact centres – although India houses some 80 per cent of UK-related off-shore contact centres.”

CCL has found that this principle is true not just for financial services but for organisations in other sectors, such as logistics/transport and health.

Currently, companies have financial problems and, because there seem to be potential cost savings to be made from moving customer contact centre operations abroad, these companies could be tempted to do this. However, Rustom pointed out, CCL’s research show that this can be a false economy.

“There has been a big debate for some years over whether overseas contact centres are worthwhile. Only now are the figures emerging,” he said.

“Principally, there are problems with operators’ accents, cultural understanding and, in the logistics/transport sector, the ‘mispronunciation’ of place names.”

According to Rustom, companies are now bringing the ‘voice’ aspect of their contact centres back to the UK – or thinking twice about sending them abroad in the first place.

Part of CCL’s specialism is helping to design contact centres – by moving contact centres to India in the first place, organisations have lost skilled and knowledgeable staff who knew about designing and developing customer contact centres. Subsequently, strategic and operational management knowledge and skills have been lost in these companies and it is this knowledge and those skills that CCL is being increasingly called upon to supply.

“We know of contact centres in India where three teams are contracted. One team is over-utilised and many calls are lost, or dropped while the other two teams are under-utilised. Contractually they are not able to move people from the under-utilised teams to the over-utilised team – thus not improving the efficiency of the operation and increasing costs to the UK-based client.

“The client just pays more and still has two teams under-utilised,” he said.

“At least, if you bring this aspect of the operation back to the UK, you stand a better chance of managing it efficiently and effectively – which, in our clients’ cases, is what seems to be happening,” Rustom concluded.