Outsourcing – The View from Inside

Outsourcing management is a hot new field, as described in the SSPA News article, Managing the Outsourcer: Best practices for an emerging field, Sept. 28, 2004. With all but the smallest of projects, it makes sense to assemble a team to manage the outsourcer rather than ask one person to do it all. Let’s inventory the roles involved in outsourcing management and see how they can be combined effectively (don’t worry, in most situations you can effectively combine several roles and you don’t have to hire an army!)

The Relationship Manager
The relationship manager owns the strategic and financial relationship with the outsourcer. If there are several members in the outsourcing management team, the relationship manager also heads the team.

The relationship manager defines the contractual relationship and ensures that the desired SLAs are met by regularly reviewing metrics and taking corrective action when needed.

The Support Planner
Few support centers are static entities, which makes the support planner’s role critical. The support planner manages the rollout of new programs, new procedures, new products, and new tools.

The support planner also works closely with the knowledge base specialist and the training specialist to ensure that all aspects of the rollout are covered.

The Knowledge Specialist
The knowledge specialist maintains the knowledge base, identifies documentation “holes”, creates new documents, and periodically reviews and refreshes existing documents to ensure that the knowledge base yields the right information every time. The knowledge base is typically used by customers, the outsourcer’s reps, and internal staff. The knowledge specialist is rarely dedicated to the outsourcer’s team, but some aspects of the work may be. For example, the knowledge specialist may create canned responses used exclusively by level 1 agents.

The Training Specialist
The training specialist creates the training materials required for training new hires and for training existing agents on new programs. Larger outsourcers tend to have internal training departments. If you’re working with one of these larger partners, you may only need to supply training curriculum, or even fairly raw information, and the outsroucer’s training group will do the rest. With smaller outsourcers, you may have to deliver the training as well as create the materials.
The training specialist usually works closely with the knowledge base specialist since it makes sense for the training to leverage the knowledge base.

The Level 2 Support Manager
The level 2 support manager takes care of issues escalated from the outsourcer and has a front-row seat for spotting deeper problems. Are the outsourcer’s agents insufficiently trained? If so, you’ll get escalations on known issues. Is the outsourcer understaffed? If so, the escalations will surge. Are the outsourcer’s agents hanging on to issues for too long? If so, expect upset clients.

Putting it all Together
Few operations are so large or complex that they require a full-time preson to fill each role described. As the outsourcing management team expands from one to many, the first split often occurs between the strategic and the tactical roles: the relationship manager handles strategic, long-term issues and the business side of the relationship while an “outsourcing operations manager” handles hands-on, day-to-day issues, provides training and knowledge base support if there are no other resources in the company, and generally keeps the information flowing back and forth.

The outsourcing operations manager is a good step up for an experienced support lead that has experience with customer issues – and solid project management skills. It’s also an interesting lateral move for a support manager who wants to grow on the business side. In either case, the outsourcing operations manager and the outsourcing relationship manager must work closely together to ensure nothing is lost or assumed to be the other’s responsibility: in outsourcing as in support itself, the trick is to get the details just right.

About the Author
Francoise Tourniaire is the founder and principal of FT Works, a consulting firm that helps technology companies create and grow their support operations. She is the author of “Successful Outsourcing”, a practical guide to creating and delivering training for support centers. For more information, visit http://www.ftworks.com/success.html or call 650 559 9826.