Ask the Experts Experts Library Outsourcing

Topic: Outsourcing

Question:
How frequently should an organization audit calls of an outsourced organization's customer representatives? How frequently should site visits occur to an outsourced call centre?

CCCAG:
Thanks for your questions. As different call centres do things differently and yet achieve great results, we've concluded there really is no one right answer to your questions but many, many, well thought-out plans and even more time spent creating functional relationships.

Establishing and understanding several critical factors at the onset of the outsourcing partnership will help the process:
1) One of the first things to determine is the fundamentals of the function being performed. The fundamentals of call sampling (monitoring) are understanding and capturing the quality of what happened from the time the conversation started to when it finished. To make this happen, there needs to be a common agreement as to what constitutes the level of quality that is desired by the organization and moreso by the customer.
2) A measurement must be created and used to allow for comparisons and achievements.
3) The results should be shared and communicated to all parties that have a vested interest in the success of the business, the satisfaction and retention of the customer and the outsourcing relationship.
4) Finally, there should be a mutual agreement that training will be provided to the agents serving customers to continue to narrow any gaps that may exist or a focus on continuous improvement and it should be incented accordingly.

If this is an important part of your business, and we would venture it is, your service level agreement should specify these steps thus making it an important part of the service provider's business too.

The number of calls sampled and the number of on-site visits is largely dependent on the kind of relationship you have created with your service provider. They should be descriptive of the way you manage the relationship and not done specifically for audit reasons. Our advice would be to let the reports that you have asked to receive on a regular basis (that give you actuals to targets) be your scorecard.

< Back to top >