Trends: Can You? Yes, We Can

Today, no one questions offshoring as an idea. Yet, for each company wanting
to offshore, there is always a first time. It cannot just blindly go ahead and
do it just because others have done it successfully. For each company, it is a
fresh assessment–of the risks and rewards, of the model, of the location, and
of course, the vendor.

What happens to the brand identity? How well can the vendor understand the
clients’ customers? How aligned will the vendor be to the company’s goals?
Very succinctly put, can the vendor replicate the company’s functional model?
For outsourcers who are taking a decision today, there is one added degree of
complexity–of time. To gain a real advantage, they need to offshore faster and
bigger processes. And that means taking bigger risks.

Or do they? Fortunately, there is an alternative that innovative BPO vendors
and clients have worked out–that of jointly owning the responsibility.
Popularly called co-sourcing, this facilitates dedicated teams of the offshore
contact center/BPO company to become the extended ‘nodes’ of the client’s
own operations. This allows the client to exercise better control over the
service delivery, which minimizes issues on security and resource availability
and leads to better management of the client’s end customer experience.

Co-sourcing means that the client and the BPO vendor have joint ownership of
everything that happens at the vendor’s site for thez customer. Even though
the work is done out of a remote facility, the place, the people and the
infrastructure are a seamless extension of the customer’s own environment in
all respects. The relationship is a true partnership and not a simple
contractual relationship. Both sides co-invest in all they do together, and the
BPO vendor is an integral part of the customer’s organizational
structure.

The BPO service provider is now more of a partner than a vendor, wherein the
service provider’s people sit in on important committee meetings of the
client, contribute to business plans while learning from theirs, and offering
suggestions on how business could be run better. A good service provider can
bring deep process expertise to the table thus significantly value-adding to the
customer’s business processes.  

So, what does it help create? Very simply, a valued symbiotic relationship
that serves the interests of both the client and the service provider–creating
a co-sourced environment of excellence and commitment, where people excel
not because they are told to but because they are given the necessary
orientation to do so. This is very critical for the success of the relationship.

Critical Factors for Success

While cost savings is the initial driver, the relationship must go beyond
that and focus more on the strategic part of a customer’s long-term plans.

• The partnership must be for a 3-5
  year duration

• Executive sponsorship should be
  at the senior management levels, who own the relationship totally. It is not
  something delegated down to someone in the organization to run

• The service provider takes
  end-to-end responsibility for the process and executes on it completely,
  flawlessly and successfully.

• With the
  customer sending out mission-critical business processes to a
  vendor, co-sourcing builds in checks and balances to ensure that the
  possibility of default does not exist. This is also directly linked to the
  quality of people hired by the service provider, its infrastructure, the
  metrics it measures, and its eye for details.

Overcoming Challenges

BPO companies can adopt this model not just to minimize the risk perception that
the client has on outsourcing his process but also leverage this model to add
further value to the client operations. Another important aspect is that BPO
companies are able to better manage their rapid growth by creating dedicated
mini-customer teams which grow at the pace defined by the customer but without
the organizational bottleneck challenges that rapid growth throws up. Moreover,
the BPO company, as an active participant in the process, gains valuable
knowledge base.

However, one key challenge in the co-sourcing model revolves around the size
of the operation being offshored. The larger the size and higher the number of
people outsourced, the greater the benefits. If the size of the project is
small, dedicated teams and infrastructure add to costs, making the delivery more
expensive for the client.

At Daksh, we address this to the degree allowed by customers and other
process considerations, by cumulating smaller processes and dedicating resources
in a step stage linked to scale allowing even the smaller processes and clients
to leverage this model.