Friday, July 29, 2016

Outsource Services! Not for Cost Reduction But for Customer Service Quality

Outsourcing, has become leading business model of our time, even so far as becoming the criterion in many industries, from being an entirely new concept of doing business 10 years ago. It plays a major role in our global economy today. Cost reduction remains a primary driver of most businesses to outsource but quality plays the crucial factor when it comes to choosing an outsourcing partner.

In fact, even as most businesses outsource a part of their operations offshore and have gone main-stream with another, there are still companies who are hesitant to entrust part of their operations to a third party. They have this notion that this might save them money but will compromise quality.


According to a survey, many companies confessed that they have expressed frustration with the quality of work being provided, but most of them said that they chose cheapest outsourcing option rather than best quality. Nearly all of them around 94% admitted that the focus on cost was increasing the likelihood of their failing projects.

It seems that outsourcing has this reputation of driving down the costs but it sacrifices quality which leads to a company’s reputation. This is not true. While it’s right that focusing only on cost reduction without thinking about quality may lead to poor customer perception of your company brand, it doesn’t mean that outsourcing operations equate poor quality. Outsourcing is just a fraction of cost of keeping operations in house; it doesn’t have to mean that quality should be compromised.

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Quality in Outsourcing

There has been a shift towards BPO’s adopting an uncompromising approach towards quality service to earn trust, continued loyalty and business of their clients. It needs not to say that companies want to hire quality outsourcing providers. And in order to measure the quality of outsourcing services, there are yardsticks and models which help companies to decipher which ones are worth considering.

Quality Assurance Models
ISO 9000

Most BPO’s have set their standards to ISO 9000. It’s most chosen norm among quality assurance models because it is used as a norm facilitating international trade, adopted by more than 130 countries. The set of standards dealing with the management system used to design, deliver, produce, and support products and services.

Revisions of ISO 9001:2008 aims on a process approach with focus on measuring performances of process and effectiveness as well as continually improving the process based on goal measurement.

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Total Quality Management 
 
ISO 9000 helped BPO companies gain a generic level of maturity quality and has encouraged others to work further towards other quality methods. Total quality management is an approach towards quality meeting competitive challenges with focus on top management commitment and involvement, supplier relationship, customer satisfaction, quality oriented training, benchmarking, employee focus, zero defects, quality measurement and process improvement.

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Six Sigma

This takes on more disciplined, personalized approach because it uses requirement of the client so incorporating it within their organization is easier. Most organizations actively embrace it at once because of the personal approach. It base its approach on a model called performance improvement named DMAIC (define, improve, measure, control and analyze).

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E-Sourcing Capability Model

It’s a model based on best practices. Its critical success factors fall into 84 best practice categories in 6 capability region: relationship, people, knowledge, threat management and performance. The cycle is broken down into 4 parts: initiation, ongoing, delivery and completion.

Going beyond Compliance

As BPO’s recognize the shift towards companies looking for quality rather than cost, they realize that quality is more important than just business compliance. It needs to be a way of life within the company. It should be a mission and not a goal. Unless there are quality measures enforced to make sure they are maintained, good performances tend to peak and then decline over the time. To make sure BPO’s not only sustain performance and continuously improve, quality should not be just complying with standards but a value built, implemented and integrated into the organization.

Nowadays, traditional landline phone customer service which businesses have may not serve your customers well –considering that we’re living in the technology era. Having customer support in mobile or online network are some of the customer assistance services we have, which can take your entire customer service to a whole new level.

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2 comments:

  1. Wow great post! customer service quality is the important one,there are plenty of oppurtunities in this sector. Business Process Outsourcing Companies is the contracting of non-primary business activities and functions to a third-party provider. Allsec has become the largest business process Outsourcing Companies in India

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