Case Study: Strategic Sourcing of Contact Center Off-Shoring

• The Case: Retailer looks towards contact center outsourcing as part of an enterprise cost reduction plan.
  
  
• The Fix: The first step was to carefully examine the details of the company’s customer contact processes - the particulars of this retailer’s contact center business, as they would become key deliverables in the outsourced traffic. A careful examination of the dynamic call center outsourcing market offered a three-tiered approach from the perspectives of cost, legal and media risk, systems integration, and cultural and language barriers: North American vendors, European, and Asian. While emerging markets offer a lower cost per logged agent hour, they also pose a greater risk in all other areas: legal, compliance, financial, systems, service quality, customer satisfaction. Scoping the particulars as well as the potential savings vs. existing operating costs, our consultant was able to identify and recommend cost savings and business process optimization opportunities that led to important reductions in operational costs for the in-house operation; by implementing the recommendations the retailer was able to reduce the operating expenses by 42%, hence becoming more competitive than the North American outsourcing negotiated rate by 15%. Based on these results, a decision was made to continue the on-shore, in-house contact center operation, and avoid all risk associated with outsourcing, without forfeiting the savings.

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