Best Practices for Outsourcing
by Bill Rose, SSPA Founder/Executive Director

As the Executive Director of your association and the resource you should rely on for best practices to drive your support organization, I strive to provide you with the best information possible. This week, I’ve been thinking a lot about outsourcing.

As support organizations evolve, becoming ever more strategic to overall company performance, more attention is being rightfully placed on support and how to maximize revenue – without adding to the budget or cost structure. Driven by economics and the need to support growing global customer bases, many technology companies have or are considering outsourcing partners to provide support for their products. Because support is often a differentiator in product/vendor selection, you can’t approach this without a solid game plan.

In fact, the outsourcing best practice sharing sessions at our Conference @ San Diego were among the most popular and provided some very solid advice. The results of those sharing sessions are posted on our site.

Using some of those best practices members provided at the conference, and mulling over how I’d go about finding an outsourcer, I came up with a methodology you can use as a starting point if you’re tasked with determining whether outsourcing is the right choice for your company.

The first step is to carefully evaluate whether outsourcing is right for you. Do this by determining your goals for extending your support organization. Are you trying to save money, time, or staff? You have to know what you’re trying to accomplish, and what you expect the returns to be, to know what outsourcer is best for you and to measure the success of the project.

Since many outsourcing projects are initiated by management, you must understand management’s goals for the project and include them in the process. You’ll also have to manage the impact this executive directive has on the support organization – not everyone will be open to the changes. Once you know you have to go down the outsourcing path, do as much research as you can and become as knowledgeable as you can be about outsourcing – before you do anything else. Become the expert.

Keep in mind that one of the goals should be that there is no noticeable difference between support from your company and support from your provider. Customers should be able to easily and transparently interface with support regardless of who provides it. This is not as easy as it sounds.

Once you have your goals, expectations, and knowledge in place, you can move on to evaluating vendors. Having established your goals makes this much easier – make the first cut based on who can meet your needs. During the evaluation process, it’s important for your potential partner to learn as much about your company as you need to learn about theirs. Do a detailed analysis of not just the services provided but also the company. This gets more important the further away the outsourcer is located. If there are troubles, down the street is different than around the world.

During the evaluation process, take special care in managing the RFP process. Make sure your RFP provides potential vendors with a good idea of your business model, your business processes, and your goals – then hold them to it. Be very clear about your service level and performance expectations; and set up escalation plans and documented procedures for handling hot customer situations.

While you’re doing this, make sure you have your infrastructure, networks, and applications in place. Your technology platform is your connection to the outsourcer and the outsourcer should be tightly coupled to your current support operations through CRM and the web to ensure the all-important transfer of knowledge.

Once selected, your outsource partner becomes an extension of your support operation and represents you to your customers. You must ensure that they are product savvy and thoroughly trained. You should expect some challenges in the first few months. Just stay on top of everything with detailed reporting, open communication, and customer feedback reviews.

To maintain a high level of service (and your comfort level), schedule regular meetings to stay informed about what’s really happening between your provider and your customers. You should also encourage certification for the support organization as well as individual representatives.

Outsourcing often produces improved processes and documentation out of necessity and forces you to better define how you deliver support. It can also remove obstacles that uncover opportunities to improve in other areas.

If you have ideas that improve this process, steps that I didn’t cover, or advice based on your experiences, please let me know by email. I’ll evaluate your feedback and publish it in an upcoming issue as well as add it to our online best practice document.

Sincerely,


Bill Rose
SSPA Founder/Executive Director