|
Contact Us! |
So there you are, proud as punch of your smart, resourceful, creative service desk team. They can answer any question and solve just about any problem from getting the lights turned on to finding out how to navigate the death benefit system. They know the company, they know the customers, and they have experience, credibility and people skills. They also have the same bureaucracy, empire building, fractionalization and promotion seeking tendencies as the rest of the company. So right in the middle of upgrading the tools, reorganizing the group and centralizing the teams, somebody starts looking at their internal support costs and asking questions like:
Couldn’t we use overseas labor ?
Yeah, in some areas, they pay less than 1/10th the
Remember CRM? The service desk needs to know a lot about the caller to
help effectively. If the
customer list includes the military or state government, they already may
have stipulated that their accounts not be supported by offshore resources.
What
about internal company proprietary materials? Does that offshore group have
security clearance? Do they support competitors? Can they support the
in-house applications? You know - the really old, embedded ones that have
little documentation?
Could we use outsourcers?
Increasingly, customers may specify US labor, which leaves the
outsourcers with only two ways to win the business - offer a lower SLA or
make it up by winning more profitable outsourcing business with the company.
Remember the outsourcers are for the most part publicly traded companies.
Increasingly, they have to show a profit on each new piece of business. And,
on top of the profit margin, they have huge upfront startup costs as well as
healthcare and benefit headaches for any transitioned employees. In this
case, the company required that the services be provided from a bespoke
center instead of a centralized support facility with many customers. This
left the outsourcers with very little profit margin, plus
facilities and real estate costs as well as the need to use the
same labor pool that the customer already had tapped.
Couldn’t we do a joint venture?
Turn this support team loose and let them function as an independent
business unit with prices in line with the industry average. Well, this is
tempting, especially if there is no upward career path from support desk to
the rest of the company. The
costs however look much like the outsourcer’s costs, real estate,
facilities, labor, infrastructure and benefits.
To be competitive, the joint venture would have to win business from
other companies. And who are they best suited to serve? The competition.
This ignores the whole issue of sunken costs and investment in
Intellectual Property, which the company has already made and which the
joint ventures other customers would capitalize on.
Just ask GM.
What is exemplary service worth?
The bottom line is no matter how good the service, it cannot cost more
than the going market rate plus at most a 5% headache premium, meaning that
it would be worth a 5% investment in what the company currently has
to avoid the disruption that a change would cause.
How can an internal support group add to the bottom
line?
By being awake and aware. By following up on root cause analysis. By
responding to the urgent problems faster by
supporting the end customer whenever possible. By identifying positive
changes and participating in action committees, change teams and six sigma
activities. By making the extra effort to get sales teams up and running in
remote locations. And, by being aware of the bottom line. A moving target is
much harder for the critics to hit.
In the end, I believe it was the tone of humility in the team’s leadership and response to the threat that smoothed things out. They knew they had problems, and they did not expect forgiveness for high costs. They did have a plan for improvement, they did make cuts, they did rethink their hierarchical structure and they did participate in other change activities.
This story is not an anomaly. When I was an outsourcer, I dreaded going up against a mobilized internal support team. They won nine times out of ten.
I recently booked a ticket on Southwest Airlines (Disclosure: I own stock, love the company and fly with them as often as I can). The web interface is great, but it lacks a certain deep understanding of the complexities of traveling with small children. So, I called the help desk to talk to a real person. This could have gone badly. Very badly! Visions of long waits, wrong answers and bureaucracy scrolled before my eyes. I like the online systems. I prefer to talk with the reservation computer, but it can’t answer the really weird questions like, “How wide are the seats and will my kid be kicking the guy in front of us all the way to Disney World?” For these and other questions, I needed a real live person to navigate for me, which the nice lady and her supervisor did.
The need for excellent, informed, creative people to answer
the phone for customers has not disappeared. It’s just moved to the next level
of complexity.