What To Consider In A Strategic Partner
By David Crow, Synergies Strategic Services
Introduction
"Made in the US" is a good thing, being successful and profitable is also a good thing. Why not combine the best of both worlds? What are the advantages of making strategic partners in the Customer Support business?
Many small/medium sized companies and US based Contact Centers are missing opportunities by not seeking strategic partners with other non-US based Centers.
Challenges
There are many articles written recently on blending IT Services taking advantages of the unique aspects of On-shore vs. Off-shore and including Near-Shore players in the mix. The need for highly integrated teams between US-based Business Analysts, agile development teams, Software Testing, and release management functions makes a blended strategy the “best of both worlds”. The new trend and catch phrase is “GLOBAL BPO”, the blending of services from On-Shore, Near-Shore and even Off-Shore.
Are you missing opportunities by not making strategic partners with other Service Providers?
Advantages to Partnering in Contact Center Industry
There are numerous advantages to partnering with an off-shore/near-shore contact center. Here are some of them to consider:
- Spread the work to lower-cost providers for lower blended overall cost for service
- Reduce risk of service outage by separating operations across geographically diverse locations
- Gaining from the experience of diversified and establish partners
- Offer diverse services to your client's by brokering them out to strategic partners
- Expand quicker or with lower capital requirements using strategic partners
- Offer multi-lingual, typically Spanish speaking, services without the pain and headache
- Utilize a partner's IT platform or business development capabilities
Near-Shore in the Spotlight
The use of Near-shore Contact Centers has recently gained much traction as multiple factors converge, like:
- Preference for accent neutral customer contact
- Back to US and US-hemisphere commerce ecosystem
- Attention to US Hispanic market
- Maturity of Call Centers in Central, South America and Caribbean
- Proximity advantages for training and intra-team coordination
- Blended campaigns combining on-shore, near-shore and off-shore activities
- Proliferation of inexpensive shared cloud based Contact Center solutions
- Overall technology facilitating globalized business
What to consider in a Strategic Partner
A strategic partner should offer complementary services to one's own. It is important that the company is reputable, honest, straightforward, and aggressive. Furthermore, a strategic partner adds value, and demonstrates organizational chemistry and stability.
It is important that this strategic partner has a solid Information Security and Quality Management Systems. ISO norms 9001 and 27001 address those issues. A company that has those two certifications has proven procedures in place towards Customer Satisfaction and ensuring the Security of customer data and information.
Of course, an exercised Business Continuity Plan (BCP) or Disaster Recovery Plan is an important step to ensure that the provider offers robust and necessary preparedness to weather disasters that may affect business, like Hurricanes and Tornados, earthquakes, public unrest, electrical outages and other natural disasters.
Case Study for the DR: We have seen outages in the US that have operational fail-over to near-shore operators that have engineered the necessary cross-training into their business strategy!
Case Study for LAM: We have seen many companies augmenting their US English-based Customer Support with Near-shore Spanish-based Customer Support, beating their competition by speaking the language of this ever-increasing market segment!
Case Study for Growth: A small US contact Center quickly added new customers and doubled in size by brokering projects that they were able to acquire from their existing customer base but could only obtain by using lower-cost providers. They benefitted by satisfying their customer needs, providing key supervisory services and obtaining a commission on this new business.