Martin Hart, Chairman of the National Outsourcing Association (NOA) explains why, when it comes to offshoring customer services, cultural affinity is proving the most critical criteria for customer satisfaction and trust.
When it comes to outsourcing and offshoring, cheapest is not always best. Santander had been quite content to take advantage of labour arbitrage – and an abundant talent pool – by offshoring to India since 2003. In the face of 165,000 complaints about its banking services in the latter half of 2010, it decided that UK call handlers were much better equipped. It’s not about accents or language barriers; cultural affinity is a must for successful offshoring. Taking the cheapest option will never be a route to success, if the quality is not up to the mark. Santander’s customer feedback stated that they “prefer to deal with call centres in the UK, where staff could understand them better as individuals and know where they are coming from”.
This is a matter of cultural fit. Only the simplest processes can be dealt with by interactive voice response – more complex problems require the operative to have a solid understanding of the caller’s culture. This is what helps good operatives open calls sympathetically, drill down to the heart of the problem, then find solutions. If your call centre operatives are not doing that, your customers’ experience will be unsatisfactory, if this happens repeatedly it can cause customer attrition and potentially damage your brand. This is not to say that every organisation will have similar experiences: recruiting good quality staff and engaging them in in-depth cultural awareness programmes can prevent poor customer experience. Cultural awareness training is a vital part of successful offshoring; the norms of one culture being used to interpret the behaviour of another – which abides by a completely different set of rules – leads to misinterpretation. Misinterpretation means misunderstandings, which are a sure-fire route to customer service anarchy! Never scrimp on arming your people with knowledge about your customers mind set. You simply cannot afford to. You will harm your brand if you do.
Another key consideration when offshoring is recruiting the best people you can. This is an absolute requirement, as these people are a customer-facing touch point for your brand. If you are outsourcing, you simply take time to diligently choose the best company for the job, and they handle the rest. Find a partner that not only shares similar cultural values to your organisation, but also a shared vision of the project and the desired end result. It is interesting that, in a survey conducted by the National Outsourcing Association in 2010, 82 percent of offshore respondents agreed that they would profile culture before forming outsourcing partnerships, compared with only 70 percent of those who worked in UK outsourcing. This implies that more offshore companies are aware of cultural differences, and willing to invest in accounting for and reconciling them.
If you are striking out on your own offshore, and setting up your call centre, it is a much more difficult situation. The way you recruit is different to the UK: you are an unknown brand in your offshore countries, operating a team remotely. You must ‘sell’ your company to potential candidates, through a local recruitment team. It is crucial to have a locally-based recruitment team – you must learn from their local knowledge, as recruitment markets vary from country to country. For example, in India the labour market is ultra-competitive – if you find someone good you have to offer them a job straight away or risk losing them to another. Good quality Indian candidates will not hang around and wait for you to deliberate!
When assembling an in-house team offshore, you need to guard against simply taking the ‘least worst’ candidates. Instead, you need to benchmark the best ones, and keep the benchmark as high as you can within the time pressure. You need to be able to find benchmarks you can use as comparisons with staff you recruit in your own country, as it can be hard to understand people’s academic backgrounds when they haven’t been educated in your own country. You need to enhance your sphere of knowledge so that you know the standard of university they went to and what their various academic grades actually mean.
The recent incidences of companies ‘backshoring’ their call centres to the UK all feature companies who were running their own operations offshore. The moral of the story? If you’re doing it offshore, outsource it to a reputable provider who will make the requisite investment for your call centre to succeed.
