TURNING SERVICE BUREAUS INTO BRAND AMBASSADORS

Companies entrust their customer relationships with outsourcers specializing in contact center services for a variety of reasons.

They may employ these service bureaus, so they can:

1. Focus on their core businesses
2. Have access to the latest technologies without added investment in infrastructure
3. Have flexible staffing resources without having to hire personnel
4. Have a partner that can take up the slack quickly when the contacts they handle in-house exceed capacity

But what they need above all else is a brand ambassador.

"Brand" has been defined as a trust-based, value-producing relationship between company and customer wherein the company delivers on or exceeds its promise again and again.

Leading outsourcers strive to fulfill that promise day in and day out on behalf of their clients. They view every phone call, every e-mail and every Web chat as an opportunity to strengthen their clients' brand integrity.

Reinforcing a client's brand with fast service delivered by polite, knowledgeable agents who are empowered with the right resources and technology can have a very positive impact on an outsourcer's bottom line and that of it clients.

The annual Interbrand survey calculates that for some organizations, brand value accounts for 60 percent of a company's total worth.

Brand awareness can prompt customers to buy a product.

Brand equity can give them reason to prefer one product over another.

Brand experience can seal the deal.

FOCUS ON CORE COMPETENCIES

The key to outsourcers for developing and reinforcing a client's distinctive and powerful brand identity is focusing on core competencies, while at the same time leveraging finely-tuned business process management skills that most clients expect outsourcing partners to contribute.

Truly branded service can be delivered through the outsourced contact center in two ways:

1. Through the people empowered to reinforce brand
2. Through the technology deployed to ensure operations are representative of business rules and customer-facing processes

The latter is especially important when considering how to map entry and exit points from within an organization and manage the intersection of outsourced and retained processes (from the client's perspective).

START WITH STRATEGY

Aside from the obvious statement, "If you can't measure it, you can't improve on it," there are a number of preliminary factors that an outsourcer or a company thinking of outsourcing should consider while developing a strategy.

Following through on the things below can help make the outsourcer-client relationship a success from all perspectives:

1. Agree on scope and objectives. Agree up front on the role and objectives of the outsourced services as they relate to both brand strategy and any in-house operations. Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) and benchmarking for future assessment against contractual service level agreements (SLAs). Examples of KPIs include call quality, first-call resolution, occupancy levels and schedule adherence.
2. Establish a common knowledge base. Empower agents with real-time information relating to customers, products, services, promotions, competition, terms and conditions.
3. Impart cultural know-how. Enable a sense of belonging through articulation of cultural values, strategy, direction and interpersonal skills essential to conveying the brand.
4. Ensure ample visibility. Implement timely and sufficiently granular measurement and reporting of representatives' performance against KPIs and SLAs. Complement this with regular recording and quality monitoring.
5. Enable representatives to satisfy multiple client interactions. Individual business processes, the need to satisfy market expectations and the importance of brand consistency (unique to each client) benefit from desktop empowerment tools, including client-specific scripting and secure screen popping of customer information.
6. Optimize operations. Leverage workforce management and analytics tools to ensure a closed-loop operation for each client and to drive efficiency of economies of scale across the outsourcer's operation.
7. Provide incentives and recognition of success. While not a requirement, providing incentives or recognizing success when agents meet requirements or service levels encourages proper brand representation.

CONSISTENCY IS KEY

For the company outsourcing its contact center function and for the outsourcer entrusted with that responsibility, providing a consistent level of service that conveys the brand or behavior traits embodied by the client is what makes the relationship successful.

Establishing an initial strategy and then consistently executing on that strategy can yield positive results for the client, the outsourcer and the customers.

Brand is an elusive and intangible notion, an embodiment of behavior. Companies that convey brand well do so because they are consistent with the manner in which they "touch" the customer, regardless of communication channel.