CRM - March 2008 - (Page 18)

CRM TRENDS AND NEWS ANALYSIS Re-shoring Contact Centers A rise in customer dissatisfaction with offshore contact centers has many companies looking to relocate closer to home n the late 1990s and early 2000s, many companies began outsourcing contact center operations to far-flung destinations such as India or the Philippines, hoping to cut costs and gain efficiencies of scale. Recently, however, several factors—growing customer dissatisfaction with the quality of service delivered by some offshore facilities; advancements made in highquality, low-cost domestic telecommunications systems; the shift to Web-based customer service—have driven many companies to bring their contact center functions back to the United States. A recent study by the CFI Group, “Satisfaction with Contact Centers Drives Customer Loyalty,” examined Americans’ perceptions of and experiences with contact centers. According to the report, customers who believed they had reached a contact center overseas rated their overall satisfaction with the service experience 18 I 26 points lower than those who assumed the contact center was U.S.-based. These customers were less likely to recommend the company to others and were almost twice as likely to sever their business relations with that company. Sheri Teodoru, the author of the study, says location was not the sole driver of negative perceptions of offshore services. “The single biggest issue and biggest source of dissatisfaction is that the first-call resolution—the ability of the representatives to solve the problem—was statistically and dramatically worse in outsourced [contact centers],” she says. “It wasn’t even a close contest. Clearly there is a language barrier which may hinder the representatives’ ability to solve the call, but it’s the fact that [customers’] issues aren’t getting fixed that’s the biggest problem.” Tim Whipple, vice president of virtual contact centers for Palo Alto, Calif.– based contact center technology provider LiveOps, says the service issues come from cultural differences between domestic and overseas locations.“There’s a contextual gap,” he explains. “When you have someone from another part of the world, there are just certain words and phrases coming out in a different accent. It’s not so much the language as it is the context of the colloquialisms of Americans versus anybody else.” Michael DeSalles, a Frost & Sullivan strategic analyst, agrees: “The concern I’ve heard about the most is simply a matter of being understood, not a matter of technical skill.” George Humphrey, director of service line management for Avaya’s Global Managed Services Organization, says that while it’s extremely common to hear about these challenges, his company is very pleased with the outsourcing services it’s had—and will continue to use—in India since the late 1990s. www.destinationCRM.com CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | MARCH 2008 http://www.destinationCRM.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - March 2008

CRM - March 2008 Contents Front Office Feedback Reality Check Customer Centricity The Tipping Point Re-shoring Contact Centers NetSuite’s Sweet Ride Takes Another Turn SaaS X.0? destinationCRM Dashboard Retailers Dream Big Detroit: Driven to Distraction Required Reading The Markets Within the Masses In Search of... Selling CRM to Your Sales Force Quixtar’s Quick Fix Travelocity’s New Traveling Companion Chasing Down First-Call Resolution Governing Better Marketing Secret of My Success Re: Tooling Connect Pint of View

CRM - March 2008

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