Ensuring Data Management and Security in an Offshore world – How to Manage the Risk

Given the increasing flow of call centre jobs to India, it’s clear that many major UK organisations are finding it hard to resist the cost reductions that result from average agent starting salaries of just Ł1,500 per annum. Each month we read how another organisation has decided to go ahead with an offshore programme. For many, the question now is less whether to move their operations abroad, but more one of when, and how they can get started.

India has grabbed much of the attention because it’s very attractive for call centre activity. It’s English-speaking, the workforce is well educated and the economics work for Western operations. However, international operations aren’t just about low labour rates – they also open up the opportunity for global organisations to provide their customers with 24x7 support, ‘following the sun’ with contact centres that are ready to take your call – whatever the time, day or night. Conceptually this makes great sense – but how would you actually go about implementing a technology infrastructure to support such a global operation, and how can you implement such an approach without significantly exposing your organisation to increased risk?

Building on a firm foundation

For organisations setting up call centres in offshore locations, selecting the right technical architecture is all about understanding the business objectives for multi-national call centres in the first place. Unlike traditional capacity onshore a unique set of business drivers are often controlling the decision to relocate some capacity to an offshore location.

The most common driver is obviously cost reduction, however many organisations are now looking to solve some of the recruitment and quality issues experienced in onshore locations, by making the move to countries such as South Africa and India. It is these drivers - along with the nature of the commitment to the offshore location - that hold the key to selecting the correct technical solution to an organisation’s onshore and offshore requirements.

Standalone offshore or integrated solution?

There are many considerations that need to be considered before designing the technical architecture for a centre based outside the country of origin. One of the key factors is whether the target location will actually be supplementing existing onshore capacity or replacing it? If capacity also needs to stay onshore, then how do the operations need to work together? Is it a single process that is being relocated, such as balance enquiry calls in financial services, or is it that a whole range of processes are being replicated in the new internationally-based offshore centre?

Many of the issues that occur in the early phases of such projects are to do with the linkage of the two capacities. Providing the business requirement is clearly understood, then the contact centre infrastructure can be designed to help ease many potential problems by selecting an appropriate architecture. Simple questions such as: ‘Do many calls need to be transferred between the local and global centres?’ need to be addressed early in development, as they can make a huge difference to the technical design process.

Along with these business objectives a number of more practical questions need to be answered, such as the size of the operation, volume of calls, nature of the call (inbound/outbound) etc. However the implications of these factors being incorrectly estimated are enormous when looking at a global operation. Take the simple issue of forecasting call volumes, for example. The main implication of a significant variance in ’prediction versus actual’ call volumes in a local centre is the requirement for additional headcount, which is a big enough problem in itself. When the capacity is based remotely you can add to this the cost implications of the bandwidth required to deliver the calls to the centre. Worse than this, the overall technical design that you used might no longer be valid, with significant additional capital expenditure needed to change the overall technical architecture of your new global capacity.

A final major consideration before designing the solution relates to the nature of the operation. For example, is it to be an outsourced operation or will you be managing your own contact centre? If it is an outsourced operation, and what’s the nature of the contract (how will payment be made), what’s your contractual commitment (the number of seats and contract period). An outsourced operation is going to have technology already in place, and this is going to be a factor that needs to be considered in the overall model for onshore integration.

All of these factors need to be considered before a technical design process can start. Needless to say the whole process of designing the technical solution must use these operational and business drivers to provide the rationale for making decision. However a problem does exist with this process - in general there is a perception that calls that are handled internationally are at a greater risk of failure than those handled in the onshore location. So the main driver for going abroad is often cost, but the controlling factor behind many decisions is often about mitigating the risk of the transaction failing, for example with calls being lost or of lower quality.

Selecting an optimum solution – network, enterprise or hybrid?

There are three technical approaches that you can take to setting up capacity overseas and the decision on which to use should be driven by the considerations outlined previously. They can be summarised under three main headings: Network Solutions, Enterprise Solutions and Hybrid Solutions.

Network Solutions

The first of these models uses global network providers such as BT, CWC and MCI to provide managed services around delivering calls to offshore locations. Every international network provider has a range of products that can be utilised to distribute calls overseas. Selecting the right product is firstly about the location of the centre – for example, Singtel is a strong candidate for Indian capacity but much less appropriate if looking at South Africa. The origin of the call is also key, for example, are all the calls coming from one country or from several regions around the world? The volume of calls and duration is the final factor that should be taken into account.

In general, these network solutions can be classified as either simple redirection services, where a provider agrees to deliver a volume of calls from one location to another, and charges you a price per minute per call. Alternatively there are network-managed services that are more commonly used when calls are originating from a number of host countries and are being delivered to a number of foreign locations on a “chase-the-sun” basis. A technical helpdesk would be a good example of this. There are normally charges for setting up a country on the service - and then call charges on top, which are different per country based on the normal tariffs for calling that region.

In addition, IN or Intelligent Network services (traditionally only available in countries such as the US and UK) are starting to become internationally available. These can provide more advance call delivery services based on real time information from call centres about agent availability. These services are normally charged on a monthly basis for the service per location, and then call costs are charged on top.

Enterprise Solutions

Enterprise solutions are applicable for organisations that want to use their own technology and rented International Lease Circuits to deliver their calls to and from their own offshore location. This approach is more commonly used when there is capacity being split across multi-national centres. It is also the preferred method for use when the international location is doing outbound work in the home country.

Within this category several approaches exist, from linking the separate ACD platforms using private signalling protocols such as QSIG right through to just placing IP turrets from the onshore ACD platform in a remote centre - making the capacity truly virtual. One factor that unites all of these solutions is the use of an IP network to minimise the cost of delivering the calls and business applications to the remote centre.

With the cost of international bandwidth coming down all the time, this approach is growing in favour because of the functional advantages it gives and the control that the organisation gains from using in house technology.

Adopting a hybrid approach

As the name suggests, these are technical solutions to the challenge of combining a network-based solution with an enterprise technical element. These are being used to minimise the cost of delivering traffic to the international gateways in the country of origin of the call, and to give an element of control back to the organisation that they lose when a pure network approach is used. Hybrid approaches are often used to address the risk of regional capacity becoming unavailable due to technical issues, while providing the onshore capacity with the best chance of seamlessly absorbing additional calls.

A recent example of a hybrid solution saw an organisation using an IN Service from a UK network provider to manage the delivery of calls by agent availability across a number of UK sites with a total capacity of just over 500 seats. When the decision to increase the capacity by a further 200 seats was taken, India was selected as the location. In order to intelligently link this offshore capacity to the UK centres it was decided to set up a node with the same enterprise ACD in the Telehouse Data Centre in London.

This location is the termination point for a lot of international bandwidth, and therefore the cost of a lease circuit from this location to India was considerably cheaper and quicker to provide than from other UK sites. Some application servers running thin client technology were also hosted at the data centre. An international lease circuit was then used to deliver 200 IP turrets and the business application to the remote site in a Delhi outsourcer. The ACD in Telehouse was then connected with the organisation’s IN Service – providing the new offshore capacity with identical characteristics to the other UK centres. In essence, calls are delivered to the India capacity first if agents are available.

This approach provides many organisations with the best of both worlds - using the network provider to handle the pre-routing of the call while maintaining the functionality at an enterprise level needed to run the operation effectively. MIS is often one of the key issues in linking local/remote capacities, and this solution avoids many of the MIS issues experienced with network solutions.

From this, you can see that there are many ways of setting up multi-national capacity from a technical perspective. Understanding the main business objectives and researching many of the operational considerations that need to be taken into account when moving or setting additional capacity remotely is the key to getting the technical model right first time.

Too many pilot projects go wrong because incorrect decisions are being made on how to service the remote location with the technology it needs to be effective. These decisions are preventing many organisations from reaping the competitive advantage that lower cost, higher quality agents in other countries can provide their businesses.