Dave Ogden explains why the need to deliver high quality customer experience is driving contact centres to re-shore.
When off-shoring became popular – in order to reduce operational costs of contact centres or the mass outsourcing of high volume processes involved in manufacturing – the focus was on quantity, not quality. However, one prominent business function seeing mass migration back to home shores is customer service.
Today, most companies want to improve their customer experience, because cheaper process outsourcing has historically not delivered the reductions that the industry had hoped for, but instead has contributed to overall customer frustration, and reduced quality of service.
Organisations are now driven by the choices of consumers: from whom they buy, how they buy from them and how they engage with them. The threat of easy supplier switching constantly looms over organisations’ heads.
While there’s no systemic issue or flawed logic in off-shoring as a concept, when organisations started to outsource overseas, customer experience wasn’t as important as it is today. There were also three overarching practical difficulties that were not considered, which meant that the customer experience was never quite right.
Firstly, being unable to understand the person at the other end of the phone is still an unfortunate factor. It pushed metrics such as Average Handling Time up, which impacted the customer on the telephone as well as those waiting in the call queue.
The number of repeat contacts with customers also increased, as interactions and the subsequent back-office processes were not always completed accurately, or were not aligned. Maintaining the level of competence and training of off-shore staff was difficult, as attrition was typically higher, too; a larger turnover in workforce meant the average skill of the advisors was lower.
Finally, an increase in complaints – which are typically handled by on-shore agents – drove the overall cost to serve the customers up to a comparable level as if they’d stayed on-shore to begin with.
When instant messaging and email joined voice calls in these off-shore locations, responses were often scripted to the point where enquiries that deviated from common questions could not be resolved, resulting in additional interactions.
Dave Ogden
Also, with the increased use of self-service, such as FAQs on websites, consumers today want a personalised resolution when they can’t find what they’re looking for, not just repetition of the text from the knowledge base.
The simple fact is that organisations are more concerned than ever before with the customer experience, and its direct impact on consumer revenues.
With thanks to Dave Ogden, Account Executive at Aspect Software.
Author: Megan Jones
Published On: 19th Mar 2014 - Last modified: 22nd Mar 2017
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