Maximize the Savings of Call Center Multi-Sourcing (While Protecting Service Levels)

Multi-sourcing is an advantage for call centers—but gains depend on implementation
Many companies are moving to multi-sourcing for call center agents, largely in pursuit of the cost savings that can come from flexibly tapping into a variety of labor pools. The trend is also growing because multi-sourcing enables call center resources to be rapidly scaled in either direction to align with business growth, call volumes and seasonality.
Still, multi-sourcing is not without peril—particularly the risk of negative impact on customer service and, thereby, damage to customer loyalty and brand. Nor are all companies that have adopted multi-sourcing realizing the expected levels of savings.

A single overarching problem is often the cause when multi-sourcing delivers disappointing results in service and savings: the lack of a common infrastructure across multi-sourced call center resources. While many call centers have all of their in-house agents on a centralized platform, their multi-sourced agents—working at various outsourcer locations or at home—may be using a hodgepodge of systems. Differences among these systems can result in problematic performance issues:

- Agents—whose workflows are shaped by the systems they use and by various degrees of access to data and tools—are unable to deliver consistent customer service. Problems stemming from lack of a common multi-sourcing platform aggravate and accentuate other inconsistencies, in agent skills, training and management, which companies are trying hard to eliminate. A company’s most valuable customers are often the first to notice these inconsistencies, and are put at risk for attrition.

- Companies and their customers struggle with unpredictable and largely unmanageable response times. Because managers lack real-time visibility into the status of all their multi-sourced call center resources, they are slow or unable to react to problems—from carrier outages to volume spikes—that affect agent and system availability.

- Poor asset utilization keeps cost per call higher than it should be. The inability to reconfigure and reallocate call distribution as situations change may result in one agent group experiencing light volume or sitting idle while agents at another location are inundated. To avoid customer service impact, companies may over-staff beyond optimal and cost-effective levels.

- Multi-site deployments, upgrades and maintenance stall time to market and drain savings. Return on investment from new products, technological innovations in call center infrastructure and service enhancements are delayed and diminished by the complexities of roll outs across the heterogeneous platforms used by multiple outsourcing vendors. Companies then pay for unnecessary and redundant maintenance in their aggregate outsourcing bills.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Companies moving to multi-sourced call centers can avoid these problems and maximize their savings and other benefits by adopting a common hosted call center platform. Hosted platforms flexibly extend across any number and variety of outsourcing resources—and rapidly scale to meet changing call volumes and business strategies. They enable companies to deliver consistent, high-quality customer service transparently to their customers while taking advantage of the growing range of outsourcing options.

This whitepaper describes how a common hosted call center platform fits into a multi-sourcing environment. We show how this type of hosting strategy enables companies to avoid the pitfalls of multi-sourcing while fully realizing its potential for delivering appreciably better service more economically than ever before.

Achieving service level consistency
When customers are interacting with a call center agent, they’re interacting with the company—that’s how they see it. The company’s ability to support this perception through technology that makes service delivery mechanisms transparent to customers is, of course, the key enabler behind call center multi-sourcing.

The problem for companies adopting multi-sourcing without benefit of a common hosted platform is that the transparency of the delivery mechanism is far from 100%. It shows itself through the numerous inconsistencies that disparate agent platforms and user interfaces cause in call center processes and workflow.

Customers who frequently interact with a call center—often a company’s most valuable customers—certainly notice these inconsistencies and soon become disappointed and frustrated by unsatisfactory and unpredictable experiences.

Inconsistent service can also turn off one-time callers, if they have an experience below the standard of quality they had expected of the company. And, unlike frequent callers, these customers may never give the company a chance to change their negative opinion.