The brand-perception value of CEM in the outsourced arena

With rapid growth in the blossoming Customer Experience Management (CEM) space comes a healthy pipeline of opportunities to work in a wide range of industries with increasingly complex projects. One of the more common organisational scenarios we’re accustomed to deploying within, is multi-tiered CEM driving performance management across both in-house operations and with outsourced partners.

The debate around the merits and drawbacks of outsourcing and off shoring in the contact centre world is a mature one. Companies in many different verticals still actively differentiate themselves from their competitors with an anti-outsourcing message in their marketing - see Churchill’s ‘dependable’-themed ad campaign this quarter featuring Martin Clunes. Clunes was, of course, the obvious candidate stemming from his raucous reliability as Gary in Men Behaving Badly. The advert stresses Churchill’s dependability derived from their strictly onshore and in-house contact centres.

Regardless of the in-house vs. outsourced marketing message - utilising CEM to close-the-loop with your customers and performance manage down to the individual employee-level is clearly at its simplest when the teams and agents whose performance is rated by the customer are all in-house. In these situations, their coaching and performance monitoring is an entirely internal consideration – and the levers to performance improvement are both visible and actionable.

But the value of effective CEM has equitable traction in the outsourced organisational structure as well. Whilst clearly the ‘levers’ of performance management aren’t as direct; asking customers for feedback following their interaction with one of a number of outsourced partners allows our clients to effectively performance manage their partners by the Voice of the Customer. The teams and agents may not be within a direct circle of control – but the sum of the customer interactions with an outsourced partner can reveal fundamental people, policy and process issues generating huge impacts on overall brand perception.

Gaining those never-before-seen insights into the nature of outsourced customer interactions and how they aggregate and influence overall brand perception provides the VOC fuel to drive both operational and strategic decisions around the nuts and bolts of an outsourcing strategy. With the real-time power of NICE Fizzback, our clients can transform both their directly employed and outsourced agents from ‘Agents Behaving Badly’ to real-time alignment behind the Voice of the Customer. 

Andrew Robson

For more info on NICE Fizzback visit www.nice.com/fizzback