All businesses are gravitating towards Customer is the King mantra, well away from the Ford one size fits all model. Customers have also realized their commanding position and have started demanding excellent quality-low cost service from providers. In such scenarios, is it wise to outsource customer service to offshore BPOs?
The traditional Marketing Services teaches you that the customer touch-points should always remain with the corporate entity. The customer service is probably the only channel that helps a company evaluate customer needs and sentiments and plan for future. If this is outsourced to a BPO, how effective will the feedback flow?
On the other hand, no company wants to run a department that doesn't form a part of its core competency. Why bother dealing with the pain of recruitment, training, retention etc., when there are other service providers who have perfected this art and can deliver it for a fraction of the cost? And they do supply back metrics, customer complaints etc., in more concise and analyzable form.
Further, customers these days have started to terribly show their dislike for customer service as they know that they are taking to someone who would possibly act as a postman with no real interest to solve the customer issue. Throw in the offshoring, low-cost into this mix and the whole outsourcing-offshoring creates such a negative feeling in the mindset of most customers. However, on the other hand, investors want companies to perform - slash out unnecessary expenditures and focus solely on value creation; and customers want low cost for everything with the highest quality.
Just imagine the plight of the manager who has to deal with all this contradicting equations trying to solve each one of them. Bharti Airtel which had originally outsourced its customer service has now started to insource them back. ICICI on the other hand is outsourcing more and more of its services to middlemen and agents - to the point where it is facing issues starting from heavy ridicule in movies to court cases on repayment harassment.
Just as any other issue in the corporate world, this has no magic bullet. One thing I feel certain is the fact that if BPOs do not further up their commitment to the companies that they serve as well as the end customers they deal with, it may just be a narrow lane for service providing entities and the road will widen for all captive outsourcing units.
The traditional Marketing Services teaches you that the customer touch-points should always remain with the corporate entity. The customer service is probably the only channel that helps a company evaluate customer needs and sentiments and plan for future. If this is outsourced to a BPO, how effective will the feedback flow?
On the other hand, no company wants to run a department that doesn't form a part of its core competency. Why bother dealing with the pain of recruitment, training, retention etc., when there are other service providers who have perfected this art and can deliver it for a fraction of the cost? And they do supply back metrics, customer complaints etc., in more concise and analyzable form.
Further, customers these days have started to terribly show their dislike for customer service as they know that they are taking to someone who would possibly act as a postman with no real interest to solve the customer issue. Throw in the offshoring, low-cost into this mix and the whole outsourcing-offshoring creates such a negative feeling in the mindset of most customers. However, on the other hand, investors want companies to perform - slash out unnecessary expenditures and focus solely on value creation; and customers want low cost for everything with the highest quality.
Just imagine the plight of the manager who has to deal with all this contradicting equations trying to solve each one of them. Bharti Airtel which had originally outsourced its customer service has now started to insource them back. ICICI on the other hand is outsourcing more and more of its services to middlemen and agents - to the point where it is facing issues starting from heavy ridicule in movies to court cases on repayment harassment.
Just as any other issue in the corporate world, this has no magic bullet. One thing I feel certain is the fact that if BPOs do not further up their commitment to the companies that they serve as well as the end customers they deal with, it may just be a narrow lane for service providing entities and the road will widen for all captive outsourcing units.
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3 comments:
Hi Shiva, Welcome back to blogging. Well Customer service is key for a company and it should go hand in hand with whatever product/service that they provide. After all who knows their product/service better. If it is outsourced, then the human touch is somewhere lost in the equation and like you said, BPOs should focus on getting their act to provide a better experience.
hey dins.. so u still tracking my blog huh! :)..
I have subscribed to your sweetkaramcoffee blog in my RSS newsreader. So when you posted that you are doing another blog, I subscribed to that one. It is really simple to track that way. Long live RSS (the feeds I mean)!
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