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When you are the founder of a start-up, addressing future contact centre strategies would barely merit a thought in the early days of business. An entrepreneur is always going to be focused on coming up with the right idea for their business, securing funding, creating a product and building a customer-base.

But as they set about establishing their business, what do they do when things start to grow quickly? One of the areas that seemingly gets neglected is the customer experience. And ironically, this is one area that really should be at the heart of any business, whether a high-growth company or established FTSE 100 firm. What can start-ups do to protect the customer experience that is so integral in modern business?

Most start-ups (and subsequently, high-growth firms) are based on the vision of the founder. That founder has a fairly fixed idea of what the business should be, what the product should feel like, who the customers are and what type of service those customers will receive. If the business idea is a sound one, then there won’t be too many customer experience problems at the outset.

On a smaller-scale, a business can manage the customer experience itself fairly easily. They are controlling each element and there aren’t sufficient numbers of customers for problems to emerge. The phone is answered on time and any issues that a customer may have can be addressed promptly and efficiently.

But business models need to evolve and change as the business itself begins to scale. And the better and more disruptive the idea behind the business, the quicker it will scale. A good UI is easy enough to manage, but getting the backend systems and right people in place is another matter. If the processes and technology can’t support a firm’s growth, then the customer experience will suffer.

Yet with many high-growth firms still having a firm eye on expenditure, an outsourced contact centre can be seen as an unnecessary expense. So founders will often try and manage this internally, conscious of the need to save money and answer to investors.

Keeping customer contact in-house is tempting. It allows the firm to retain control, is straight forward, initially cheaper and there are fewer opportunities for the brand to suffer through association with an outsourced contact centre.

But in fact, sourcing this requirement gives better results and in the long-term is as cost-effective. This is what a high-growth firm should look for when looking to appoint an outsourced contact centre provider:

Transparency – when a high-growth firm trusts an outsourced partner with their customers, they do want reassurances as to the quality of interactions with those customers. This can be provided by the provider being clear and transparent about: call volumes; the number of calls answered; how many calls are lost each day; and providing KPI scores each day to ensure things are as they should be.

A high-growth heritage – although the principals of a contact centre for a high-growth firm are the same as for an established multi-national firm, there are certain nuances that need to be addressed. What kind of customer base does your proposed provider have? Have they worked with other high-growth firms in the past? If you can see firm evidence of success with other high-growth firms, then that is a good sign they could be the right fit for your business.

The right technology – this is an increasingly important element for any outsourced contact centre provider. Anyone working with a high-growth firm needs to be able to demonstrate they can make use of advances like Visual IVR and the Single Digital Channel (SDC). SDC gives a customer service agent access to all media types from their desktop, with all contact interaction taken by customers - voice, email, chat, social media – waiting in one queue to be addressed by the right agent. The ‘right’ agent can mean the next available agent, one with a particular skill-set or area of expertise, or even one with a prior history with that customer.

It allows agents to deliver a much more efficient service and is a real asset to any high-growth firm wanting to deliver true next-generation customer experience. But such advances would not be available should a high-growth firm choose not to outsource its contact centre. That’s why sourcing is the best option for any high-growth firm that wants to continue offering the best customer experience as the company scales and grows.

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Mike Hughes is MD at customer management consultancy, PeopleTECH. Mike has a proven track record in demonstrating a deep understanding of the people, technology and processes required to deliver a 21st century customer experience.

In an interview with Computing, Specsavers CIO Phil Pavitt has slated the abilities of third party service providers, saying: “Outsourcing partners’ quality of service is the lowest I’ve ever seen.”

He continued: “The innovations to improve it are very low and the investment is very low - and I've never quite seen such a poor part of the market… The system integrator market is huge, fat and lazy and I think people are starting to realise that.”

Specsavers has previously outsourced to providers such as SQS for end-to-end testing of business applications, and both Ricoh and Fujitsu Siemens Computers for IT services. Its biggest partners include Accenture, IGATE and Oracle.

Read more here.

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Tech Mahindra has launched its fourth centre in the Philippines, making it one of the fastest-growing service providers in the region.

The new centre in Cebu follows the opening of two in Manila and an earlier centre in Cebu. The facility will serve the firm’s global enterprise and telecommunications clients.

Sujit Baksi, Chief Executive of the Tech Mahindra Business Services Group, said that “The Philippines region is key to our growth strategy; over the past few years we’ve invested heavily in developing capability to serve the transformational needs of our customers arising from the influx of digital.

“With the addition in Cebu, around 14 per cent of our global workforce is now concentrated in the region. We have grown over 400% taskforce since 2008.”

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Ashley Almanza has been chief executive of G4S since May 2013, taking over from Nick Buckles in the aftermath of scandals connected to G4S’s role in the 2012 London Olympics.

Almanza has now been awarded 73 per cent pay rise, as a reward for making G4S profitable again. In 2014 he earned £2.5 million; in 2013 he earned roughly £1.9 million, thanks to the addition of a significant cash bonus to his base salary.

A spokesperson from the company said: “G4S has structured its remuneration packages to drive the financial, operational and cultural changes necessary to ensure our business is both delivering for stakeholders and able to take advantage of the long-term growth opportunities.”

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Ravi Shankar Prasad, India’s communications minister, has announced that the government plans to set up new BPO firms in small towns, bringing 48,000 new jobs to those living outside of India’s cities.

“My idea is to have BPOs in Bhagalpur, Muzaffarnagar, Gorakhpur, Deoria, Saharanpur, Idukki, Aurangabad and places like Dhenkanal… The BPO centres will be allocated according to the population of each state as per the last census,” Prasad told the Hindustan Times.

Asides from bringing much-needed jobs to those living in remote locations, this new initiative is expected to improve the country’s literacy rate and slow down rates of urban migration, which are currently prompted by the lack of job opportunities.

The government’s plans have been welcomed by the majority of India’s BPOs. Praveen Kumar, global CEO and director of ISON Group, commented: “We are happy such a policy is being planned, we would like to explore such opportunities.”

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The London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham is close to tender for a shared content management system (CMS) on the Drupal platform.

Due to take place via the G-Cloud framework and in partnership with tri-borough partners Kensington & Chelsea and Westminster councils, this project will cost the council approximately £414,000.

Their current CMS is not responsive to mobile phones or tablets, hence why they’ve opted for this new project. It will also allow them to move to a single web ICT support team across all three separate councils.

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Firstsource, the global provider of customised business process management (BPM) services, has announced that it will be creating 300 full-time jobs at the Firstsource Solutions centre in Cardiff Bay.

The new roles are as sales and customer experience advisors, handling both inbound and outbound telephone calls on behalf of Sky.

Kathryn Chivers, vice president of sales at Firstsource Solutions, said: “We already employ over 800 staff at our Cardiff centre, which was recently recognised as the leader in its field at the Welsh industry awards.

“This is a great opportunity to work for an organisation committed to providing an engaging workplace with excellent benefits, regular training and many development opportunities for a chance to grow within the business.”

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Read part 1 of 'Is the Future Bright for Outsourcing?

I would like to illustrate this with an example, again, from National Rail Enquiries.

Whilst we have been multi-sourcing for quite a while we have generally left hosting with the application provider. The diagram below (Figure 12.1) could be the National Rail Enquiries website.

The first box could be the website user interface where the application supplier also hosts this part of the website. The second could be the journey planner where the hosting is in with the website user interface. The third could be the design company with the fourth being the static data (information on stations, train companies etc.) that is hosted by the application supplier.

The fifth box could be the real-time predictions system where hosting is also with the application supplier, and so on. Some services, such as design, do not require separate hosting but if the service requires hosting it goes with the application contract.

Figure 12.1 Multi-Sourcing Model

Figure 12.2 National Rail Enquiries Demand Issue

However the hosting being split across suppliers like this is not ideal.

The people running the applications are not necessarily experts in hosting and having several hosting operations is inherently inefficient with excess capacity in each area and not having the ability to gain volume synergies.

However for National Rail Enquiries we had a specific issue with demand that made this arrangement even more unsatisfactory.

Figure 12.2 shows journey plans each day for National Rail Enquiries over a three-year period. It is just journey plans so doesn’t show the impact on the real-time and other systems. As you can see there is a general upwards trend with a daily volatility that gives a high and low with about 500,000 journey plans being the spread.

However you will also notice some major spikes both up and down. The downs are the Christmas period, where people tend to take leave – and also passenger trains do not run on Christmas day.

The spikes upwards are easily explainable but a little harder to predict.

Take for example the spike up to 4 million from a run rate of just under 1.5 million in November 2010. This was caused by heavy snow, on a weekday, in the South East in England. Many people commute into London every day for work (around 750,000) and the train is the most common mode of transport.

When people wake up in the South East on a work day and see the world has turned white many of them will contact National Rail Enquiries. This may be by phone, web, mobile web, app, SMS, social media etc. but it all comes into the same systems. The same thing can happen with storms as was seen with the October 2013 storms in the south of the UK that severely disrupted rail travel. National Rail Enquiries had 3.5 million visits on 28 October 2013

(the day after the overnight storm brought a large number of trees down onto railway lines), 6.3 million journey plans (off the chart on the scale above) and 18 million requests for real-time information.

However it isn’t just weather. The UK rail system is very safe but they do have accidents and they do have major delays, however rarely. These can occur at any time and have the same effect as snow but are even less predictable.

The National Rail Enquiries service can’t be allowed to fall over so we set capacity at a very high level. Fine for the customer as the service is always there and hardly even slows down, but not so good for the service maintaining a high level of capacity all year round when it is hardly ever used.

What we needed was to combine the various hosting arrangements and have a service that flexed with our demand. I am of course talking about cloud hosting so when that service became popular we were very interested to move to it.

However, cloud hosting brings its own issues. The cloud suppliers are currently high in technology delivery and low in support. You need to be able to manage your services on their systems and do you own scaling of capacity. They will supply whatever you need but you need to tell them how much that is.

Because of the complexity of this we introduced a Service, Integration and Applications Management (SIAM) company into the mix. This is shown in the following diagram (Figure 12.3).

Figure 12.3 Multi-Sourcing with Cloud Hosting

Read part 3 of 'Is the Future Bright for Outsourcing?'

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Derek Parlour's book, Successful Outsourcing and Multi-Sourcing, is available to purchase here. Members of the National Outsourcing Association are currently eligible for a significant discount - just use the code G14IZN30 on the Gower Publishing website.

The global outsourcing giant Serco has lost its grasp on yet another contract – this time work sterilising medical equipment at the Fiona Stanley hospital in Perth, Australia.

The health minister for Western Australia stripped this responsibility from Serco after ‘blood and tissue’ was found on equipment that Serco personnel had allegedly already sterilised. Serco will retain the bulk of its £850m, 10-year contract with the hospital, providing non-clinical services. However, there is to be a further review into clinical healthcare at the hospital at a later date.

This news comes after a terrible 2014 for Serco where the company saw numerous contract scandals, including the failure of a £285 million prisoner-transfer contract with the UK government.

In March 2015, Serco CEO Rupert Soames was quoted saying: “There is a real sense that, having confessed our sins and in taking the punishment, we are now ready to start on the path to recovery.” Serco since announced its plans to sell off a number of BPO operations.

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Read this next: Serco Seeks Redemption after £1.3bn Operating Loss

Capita has revealed that its headline dividends have more than halved in the first quarter of 2015, down 52 per cent from £30.9 billion to £14.78 billion.

In 2014, the figures for Capita’s first quarter were greatly enhanced by a £15.9 billion dividend from Vodafone, which accounts for the discrepancy. Capita are also anticipating a £630 million dividend from Barclays, the payment of which is expected sometime in the second quarter.

In fact, once these special dividends are removed, Capita’s quarterly growth rates are up 10.4 per cent year-on-year, hence why the company is unconcerned with its poor headline figures for 2015.

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