Customer Care Outsourcing

There is a rising need across businesses to convert the regular order-taking contact center to revenue-generating profit centers within the next few years. The customer contact center is thus, evolving from being a plain vanilla customer service center to the more advanced, more valuable revenue generating center. The service call, which is the lifeline of the customer contact center, provides immense potential to initiate a sales cycle.

The primary focus of Training and Development (T&D), earlier, was to provide accent training and comprehensive technical training. The job of the T&D team ended with new hire training, apart from being intermittently called upon to fix performance gaps identified on the work floor. The focus was to ensure that the go-live timelines were maintained and performance sustained. However, with the changing market dynamics and emergence of new technologies, the paradigms for T&D have changed. T&D can no longer function as a separate department; it is a critical element of the supply chain for any business. Although T&D is not a revenue center, it is imperative that it partners with the business to manage performance and own delivery.

Europe is going through difficult financial times, and the outlook for the contact center outsourcing market in Europe provides a ray of hope. In a recently released report, it is estimated that the European market would grow at an annual rate of three percent from 2010-2017. However, going by the history of years of customer dissatisfaction, the European Commission asked the European Standardization Institute (CEN) to draw up a European norm for customer contact centers. The European norm or ECCS defines detailed guidelines for customer service, including those for selecting, hiring and training of agents, the organization of the contact center management, the setup of customer processes and quality monitoring. It is encouraging to see the interest that the industry has shown in it. A contact center with ECCS certification distinguishes itself from others in the market. The ECCS quality mark will be a guarantee for customers that the contact center has the requisite qualities to provide fast and efficient service, and that their customers will be handled well. It will serve the industry well by adopting the standard throughout Europe.