Turning the offshore model upside down with IP

Despite the clear financial benefits of moving call centre operations overseas, many major organisations are still unsure about how to integrate offshore resources into their call centre strategy.

Generally, the main reason organisations consider moving their call centre operations offshore is to save costs. However, smart companies are now realising that in order to differentiate them selves and gain market share, they need to exceed customer expectations and use ‘service as a strategy’, focusing on customer satisfaction and first time call resolution. To date, most people who have experienced a call diverted out to India have found the quality of the transaction low, with the cultural differences and heavy accents proving a barrier. For companies considering the offshore model, getting the balance between saving costs and delivering a quality service will be a key challenge.

Until recently, maintaining control over the quality of service offered at offshore centres were extremely difficult. Traditional call centre infrastructures meant that companies using these centres would route all callers straight through to an offshore agent, and any control over that call was immediately lost. With the broader adoption of IP architectures, companies are now able to turn this model upside down and for the first time, rather than re-directing the call overseas, can focus on bringing the agent to the caller. Agents simply log on to the UK switch and can be managed as part of an integrated call centre/IP telephony infrastructure.

This has significant implications both for organisations using their call centre to drive their ‘service as a strategy’ programmes, and for the intelligent integration of both onshore and offshore resources. Organisations can now start to build call centres, with agents situated around the world, all simply operating as IP endpoints.

Using IP within your offshore model offers four key benefits:

• Overall infrastructure requirements are reduced
  
• Companies can maintain control over customer processes and technology, ensuring a consistent level of customer service
  
• The right customer contacts can be connected to the right call centre agents, and at the appropriate cost level, enabling true customer segmentation
  
• Organisations can now tap into cheaper labour pools anywhere in the world

So it’s not about simply closing everything in the UK and moving to India - bringing the ‘agent to the caller model’, using IP technology, will address some of the key issues around setting up a call centre offshore, particularly for companies that are serious about using service to create real competitive advantage.