Industry news

With more companies using contact centres for front-end customer engagement than ever before, the relationship between clients and their customers is increasingly dependent on the capacity of the call centre to respond to customer needs efficiently, informatively and professionally.

With an increasing focus today on personalised service, there is much scope, then, to not only take and deliver information efficiently, but also to build a brand’s relationship with its customers on an individual basis. Friendly, efficient and informative customer service will ensure long term brand loyalty and encourage word-of-mouth recommendation. So how can contact centres improve their reputation and increase customer loyalty by building meaningful rapport with customers?

The most important factor is a committed, well-informed and professional tone on the phone, which comes from long-term, happy and motivated employees. But are contact centres and their technology vendors delivering a working environment that sustains the levels of employee satisfaction required to drive productive, long term relationships? Employee absence and attrition levels are a good indicator of wellbeing and satisfaction within contact centres. Industry research over the last few years has shown that agent attrition and absenteeism remains high in the outsourcing industry.

In a recent white paper - Building Trust in the Workplace – I discuss whether we are missing the single most important part of any productive and successful relationship. TRUST. The paper suggests five practical steps that can be taken immediately to sow the seeds for a culture of trust in the call centre and ensure that agents have the tools and access to information to make informed decisions when on the phone to customers.

You can read the full white paper here:

Building Trust in the Workplace

The National Outsourcing Association (NOA) has told the London Assembly it is unfair to assume that the Metropolitan Police Service is liable to commit a “high-profile outsourcing failure”, Police Professional has reported.

The UK police news site quoted Kerry Hallard, CEO of the NOA, on her reaction to the London Assembly Budget and Performance Committee’s claim that the Met is likely to follow in the footsteps of the Ministry of Justice and get caught up in an outsourcing scandal with the private sector.

She told Police Professional: “Only outsourcing failures make for big headlines, yet the vast majority of public sector outsourcing is an undeniable success. The Met Police are experts in what they do – that’s policing. Outsourcing will allow the Met to focus on core tasks rather than IT and back-office services, which will be handled instead by third-party specialists.”

Ms Hallard also drew attention to the fact that, while the Committee’s “To Protect and Save” report briefly touches on the ongoing outsourcing relationship shared by Cleveland Police and Sopra Steria, it neglects to mention many of the positives outcomes Cleveland’s police force has experienced as a result: a 25 per cent reduction in cost, 31 more officers on the frontline and greatly enhanced technological abilities. The Met Police recently signed its own ten-year contract with Shared Services Connected Limited, a company majority-owned by Sopra Steria.

Kerry Hallard added: “I’m sure that the Met and other police departments around the country will be hoping to emulate Cleveland’s accomplishments.”

However, the NOA CEO did agree with the London Assembly’s recommendation that the Met should improve its commercial expertise, along with many other outsourcing contract managers working in the public sector. She said as much when she addressed the Assembly back in June.

The NOA offers specialised training to these personnel through its Public Sector Skills Academy, precisely so that they can upskill commercially and negotiate more competitively with their private sector counterparts.

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Related: How the UK’s police will cut down its £1 billion-a-year IT costs

Fujitsu and Gatwick Airport have announced plans to extend their successful outsourcing relationship by another five years, with the intention of removing the existing printer estate and delivering a “full technology refresh” which will include the use of single and multi-function printers.

This win comes off the back of a contract signed by Gatwick Airport, Fujitsu, Xchanging and Cisco to provide a communications infrastructure which will make devices in the airport more collaborative, with the addition of voice, video and instant messaging services throughout the building.

The new Fujitsu-Gatwick Airport deal will benefit over 2,750 personnel, including 1,100 office users, 1,500 operation users and 150 contracted users. The number of required printer assets will also be reduced by 20 per cent, increasing cost-efficiency. Customer experience for the airport’s passengers will be greatly enhanced as a result.

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Related: HMRC Issues £20 Million Tender for New Consultants to Advise on Aspire Transition

Capita has a made a bid to take over business processing, technology and procurement specialist Xchanging, causing the value of Xchanging shares to rocket by over 50 per cent.

However, Capita faces stiff competition from private equity firm Apollo Global Management. Xchanging recently revealed in a statement to the press that Capita placed an initial bid at 140p per share, in cash raised to 160p, while Apollo has made a separate offer of 170p per share.

The bids were made shortly after Xchanging admitted that its procurement division had performed poorly for the first half of the year; the company’s CEO Ken Lever has also indicated to the board that he intends to retire from his position at the end of 2015.

These takeover offers have come at a time when an increasing number of organisations are looking to outsource administrative processes to third party specialists, such as Xchanging, in order to increase focus on core tasks and improve their technological capabilities.

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Related: Xchanging finds supply chain risk is the greatest external challenge for businesses

The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) completed a two-year project to bring IT services back in-house last month, Computer Weekly has reported.

The DVLA’s outsourcing strategy – set up while Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister – has existed for over 20 years, yet it only took CEO Oliver Morley a few days to make the decision to backsource the organisation’s IT after he joined in 2013. The claim is that this project will save at least £225 million over the course of 10 years, along with an extra £70 million saved in procurement costs.

Iain Patterson, the current CTO at the DVLA who will soon move back to the Cabinet Office, explained: “We looked at the architecture and the cost of standing still, which we estimated to be in excess of £230 million, and to run a procurement programme would have cost £80 million.

“For the most part we are doing it ourselves but we have plenty of partners – big and small – still with us, who will be doing a large part of the work. But we have the relationship directly with them, we coordinate delivery, we have mixed development teams and it is very important we own the overall model.”

The DVLA is the UK’s second biggest organisation for collecting direct debit payment, with larger UK revenues than even Amazon. Oliver Morley believes that, despite backsourcing, the DVLA is transitioning to digital at a rapid pace, with at least 90 per cent of its customers making use of the DVLA’s digital services.

“I would put us against anyone in the public and private sectors in terms of how much digital transformation we have done,” Morley said.

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Related: How the UK’s police will cut down its £1 billion-a-year IT costs

HP and IBM have received two of the highest Net Promotor Scores (NPS) in the IT service provider industry, a report published by the Temkin Group has shown.

The same research showed that Accenture Consulting received the lowest NPS score among all technology vendors included within the report. They were joined at the bottom by CA Technologies, Hitachi, Wipro and Deloitte, all of whom wound up with NPS scores of 10 or less.

SAS Institute’s overall score – 57 – was the highest recorded by an IT vendor (with non-outsourced engagements included), with HP Outsourcing, IBM Global Services, Oracle Outsourcing and Dell Outsourcing also joining them with scores well above the average.

The Temkin Group has been evaluating NPS results for 62 specific service providers over the past four years.

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Related: Top five UK service providers revealed by TechMarketView

Romania is establishing its claim as one of the fastest growing economies in the European Union, and a large part of that is due to its rapid growth as a destination for outsourcing and nearshoring.

This fact was one of the focuses at “Outsource Romania”, an event hosted by the embassy of Romania, where Romanian Ambassador to the UK H.E. Mihnea Motoc spoke on the country’s prominence as an “outsourcing valley for BPO”.

He added that Romania also flourishes in terms of “research programmes, information technology outsourcing [and] contact centres, either shared services and/or outsourced”. He continued: “The new age of outsourcing is more about innovation and outsourcing certain capabilities, cost-effectiveness has replaced pure lowest cost.”

Paolo Marcattilj, UK Director of Global Remote Services (a Romania-based multi-lingual contact centre), commented: “Some of today’s leading UK and European businesses are choosing to outsource to Romania… Romania is becoming a top outsourcing destination.

“The cost efficiencies are really a by-product to the work we are doing to help grow global businesses through building great customer relationships and experiences. We were delighted the Ambassador from Romania to the UK highlighted the benefits of our language abilities and highly skilled work force, still widely underexploited by many UK companies.”

Romania is just one of many Central and Eastern European nations making great strides in service provision: others include Poland, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Slovakia, to name just a few.

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Related: Spotlight on Romania as an outsourcing destination

There are few in the industry who would deny that outsourcing is undergoing a dramatic change. Many in the media are citing mass job losses; there are others claiming that the end of outsourcing itself is nigh.

The main cause for concern is new technologies enabling phenomena like robotic process automation, which is making it easier for former outsourcing buyers to backsource operations and provide them in-house. On the other hand, the same technology stands to empower service providers, allowing them to provide more efficient operations and focus even more on customer centricity.

Now it’s your chance to have your say: does 2020 mark the decline of outsourcing or will the industry thrive? The National Outsourcing Association has launched its “Outsourcing in 2020” campaign, beginning with a survey targeting outsourcing buyers, suppliers and those providing support services.

You can take the survey here:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/8NMRWCG

Those that participate will be able to receive the full research report in November, months before it is officially published in the Outsourcing Yearbook 2016.

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Related: The Outsourcing Yearbook 2015

The London Assembly has warned the Metropolitan Police that it faces huge risks if it continues down its current path of planned outsourcing, and that the force must better its “business nous” in order to find the right commercial partners and manage contracts effectively.

The recommendations were given off the back of the Budget & Performance Committee’s “To Protect and Save” report, which aims to identify some key lessons for the Met to consider at each stage of every contracting process. With the Met likely to pursue further deals with the private sector following its £216 million contract with SSCL – majority-owned by Sopra Steria – the Assembly is concerned that the public sector will become embroiled in another high profile outsourcing scandal.

The report cites Sopra Steria’s long term outsourcing relationship with Cleveland Police, criticising the firm’s use of zero-hour contracts and asking the Met to clarify whether it intends to use similar contracts. The report does, however, neglect to mention the overwhelming number of positives that have arisen from that particular public-private partnership: massively improved technological capabilities, 25+ per cent reduction in costs and far more officer on the front line. Cleveland Police has become one of the most technologically advanced police forces in the country and the Met will be hoping to emulate its success.

That said, commercial skills are of key importance during contract negotiations and are often found to be lacking in the public sector, which adds some weight to the Assembly’s advice.

Read the full report.

Are you a public sector worker looking to develop your commercial skills? Then the NOA's Public Sector Skills Academy is perfect for you.

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Related: How the UK’s police will cut down its £1 billion-a-year IT costs

Mitie has joined fellow giant service providers Serco and G4S in publicly welcoming the government’s plans to introduce a new living wage, which will force all UK-based employers to pay over-25s at least £7.20 an hour from next April onward.

The company’s CEO Ruby McGregor-Smith has said that Mitie will look to offset the additional costs by winning more contracts and increasing the scale of its operations. She added that, due to the wage hike being “regulatory”, all companies will almost certainly comply with the changes at board level.

Mitie has recently won two new public sector contracts – one with Kensington & Chelsea council and one with Hammersmith & Fulham – that will earn the firm roughly £25 million between now and 2020.

The news came shortly after CBI director-general John Cridland openly accused the government of burdening service providers with the cost of wage increases, making the prospect of public sector work less appealing as a result.

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Related: UK service providers threaten to pull out of immigration detention centre contracts