- - http://www.jmoellerconsulting.com/call_centre_outsourcing_blog.htm - This is an analyst style blog about Call Center Outsourcing and Call Center Management. en-gb - ? Copyright Jens Moeller Consulting Ltd, Call Centre Consultant 17th October 2007 Jens Moeller info@jmoellerconsulting.com - - http://www.jmoellerconsulting.com/call_centre_outsourcing_blog.htm - Steve Morrell, and his Analyst and Market Research company Contact Babel have just released their US Market Report. I like the insights into the Outsourcing section, so I publish them with his permission. You can find more extracts regarding other Call Center topics on the Call Center Management Software Directory and Resource Softigator. Here is the summary of the Outsourcing section... - - - http://www.jmoellerconsulting.com/call_centre_outsourcing_blog.htm - To begin with, it is vital to double check why you have opted for call centre outsourcing (and not a pure in-house solution) in the first place. Have a look at the reasons why you have decided this way - your future call centre outsourcing partner should be strong in these very points. For instance, you may have opted to outsource call center outbound campaigns because they require sales skills beyond your staff?s abilities. Or, you want need a quick solution to go live with customer support for a new product. There can be many reasons... - - - http://www.jmoellerconsulting.com/call_centre_outsourcing_blog.htm - For a lot of people this may sound boring, since they have heard it so often before. However, there is a difference between Marketing buzzwords - and actually seeing something happen in the industry. The convergence of Call Centre Outsourcing and IT Outsourcing was the game for global corporations in the first place, largely supported by the global top 10 consulting companies in this business arena. But lately, the borderlines between the business arenas are blurring. One point is the trend towards Software as a Service (SaaS). More and more software vendors offer their products as both client-server and on-demand versions. This, in turn, enables Call Centre Outsourcing providers to react more flexibly to their clients demands: eventually, as I discussed before, projects tend to involve not only increasing numbers of customer contacts, but also channels (phone, email, fax, SMS etc.), and processes are becoming more and more complex to meet the end customers rising expectations. Outsourcers can purchase or rent as many lincences as they need on a month-by-month basis for smaller pilots and then change this amount "as they go". This provides shorter pilot cycles, faster set up times and lower pilot costs... - - http://www.jmoellerconsulting.com/call_centre_outsourcing_blog.htm - Two major trends have changed the pricing structures in the market significantly: On the one hand more and more companies want to outsource whole end-to-end processes - often including back office activities and even non-Call Center related processes. Clients may even want to outsource whole customer service departments; sometimes via a sell-and-lease back model (full outsourcing often including people and technology) and sometimes they just decide to close their own department down and hire a bureau. All these cases have one thing in common: many of the classic call center metrics won't work here anymore. Service goals like service level, first contact resolution rate, lost call rate etc. still need to be measured by the call centre outsourcing provider, but they are not the goals the client is pursuing... - - - http://www.jmoellerconsulting.com/call_centre_outsourcing_blog.htm - Some of you have asked me to talk about decision criteria, how to select a call centre outsourcing company. Outsourcing call centre services can be seen as a wheel of steps which continues to turn over and over again. Only repetition and improvement will enable top performance in outsourcing. Thus, never forget that outsourcing vendor selection can only be as good as your outsourcing model. For instance, you will not make a good decision if you are looking for "a telemarketing company" measuring their call durations because you pay them per call minute. And in reality you are looking for a partner to take over complete processes such as "order taking" or "appointment setting". In that particular case, you would be better off looking for a Business Process Outsourcing provider (BPO) and charging per process result. e.g. per order or per made appointment...