he disruptive benefits offered by BPO partners or offshore outsourcing has been a boon to global business organizations in many aspects. Achieving sustained revenue growth, improved internal/overall business efficiency and growth surge, and more have been possible with the technological competence and personnel expertise along with the cost-benefits, which toned down their internal operational expenses, largely.
The transformative phase achieved by business organizations with the highly capable assistance from BPO service providers added more value to them as well. It was beyond just cost reductions, as it augmented broadening of their market capacities, reinforced customer relationships due to enhanced service experience, and round-the-clock support.
Being said is easier than done, as business enterprises should ensure that they carefully choose the best BPO company with good background checks. It is daunting to make partnerships with an ungrounded service provider that is prone to crash your business.
So what are the effective ways through which you can manage your BPO partner so that all the involved parties receive equal fruitfulness?
A Long-term Win-win Business Potential
Your requirements might be for the present, but you should certainly aim for long-term business potential from a BPO service provider who offers comprehensive and consistent services towards the future. So it’s vital to maintain an incentive and collaborative approach among you both that will create a “win-win” situation.
Shared Responsibility
To leverage the optimum potential of your offshore outsourcing partner, it’s not always about leaving full responsibility to your partner. If you do the same, i.e., without resolving the upfront, upstream process issues, ultimately, you are solely responsible for the unfavorable outcomes that you face. This means the loss suffered is due to your inaction. So get involved and resolve stuff that is likely to hamper operations, since you have ownership with an equal responsibility in dealing with escalations, even if it is at times.
Innovation
On the contract-signing phase make sure your offshore outsourcing partner has the financial commitment in investing embedded innovation for process efficiency. This part mostly loses out for the client while in the contracting and negotiating phase and ensure this is highly implemented.
Prepare Methodically
You should never have even the tiniest speckle or clarity loss while you are trying to outsource your critical processes to a BPO service provider. You can avoid this if you prepare yourself methodically and with a precise vision on what you’re trying to accomplish. It is almost similar to the decision-making process, and if you have pristine planning, you can save yourself from hidden costs, overcharging, vendor terminations, senior management escalations in the first year, or even chances of operational reversing back to your in-house. So always do in-depth research on the minutest things at every step of deciding on outsourcing.
Strategic Sourcing or Tactical Sourcing?
You should know whether you should go for strategic sourcing, which is
- Long-term, where the client organization goes for a proactive, holistic, and continuous evaluation and re-evaluation of the sourcing activities, at lowest ownership costs with minimal risks or the short-term effectiveness of tactical sourcing where
- Organizational activities are only looked upon when needed, traditionally, with a reactive approach towards its management at the lowest possible costs without considering the relationship, risk mitigation, etc.
Although both provide significant opportunities to drive strategic decisions, they are different apart from some essential elements that overlap. So have a clear idea as to what kind of service you require from the best BPO company.
Strategy & Relationship
The entire business transformational opportunity lies within your relationship with the BPO vendor. That relationship should be smooth, strategic, and with a partnership attitude that will grant a broad transformational nature, precisely focused on driving efficiency and effectiveness, generally on a long-term basis. The benefit of the same is that the outsource provider can offer you extensive process leverage and enhanced functional expertise for achieving all your business objectives.
Broad Operational Scope and Periodic Contract Review
Your detailed and individual business requirements should always be known up-front in your planning. This is possible if you have separate project purposes and unique requirements with different types of processes, resources, or costs. So what you could do is invest in a broader range of processes (only based on requirements) with robust project management and adaptability where you can review the specific contract periodically.
Operational Effectiveness
Ensure emphasis on performance management, services management (through contracts), process management, professionals trained up-to-minute, unfailing communication channels, etc. are top-notch. Even for toning down and eliminate issues, with positive and proactive methods, with the help of robust structures, escalation protocols, and root cause corrections mechanisms (for repeated issues) has to be comprehensive and well established. Ensure you have all these effective and in-place for maximum operational effectiveness.
Intermediary Governance Council
This council plays a pivotal and crucial role in maintaining the relationship between you and the best BPO company. The governance is done on almost all the activities such as periodic relationship appraisals, creating a project management office, managing operational risk, or simply undertaking the implementation of new services, or even in extreme cases of dispute resolution – to act as a key intermediary. The representatives of this council should be from all the departments and should abide by a set of principles aligning with service delivery objectives and a unique set of objectives and missions.
These are the vital methods you should be considering seriously to effectively manage your BPO partner on all levels of your business venture.