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Today, no one questions offshoring as an idea. Yet, for each company wanting to offshore, there is always a first time. It cannot just blindly go ahead and do it just because others have done it successfully. For each company, it is a fresh assessment—of the risks and rewards, of the model, of the location, and of course, the vendor.

What happens to the brand identity? How well can the vendor understand the clients’ customers? How aligned will the vendor be to the company’s goals? Very succinctly put, can the vendor replicate the company’s functional model? For outsourcers who are taking a decision today, there is one added degree of complexity—of time. To gain a real advantage, they need to offshore faster and bigger processes. And that means taking bigger risks.

Or do they? Fortunately, there is an alternative that innovative BPO vendors and clients have worked out—that of jointly owning the responsibility. Popularly called co-sourcing, this facilitates dedicated teams of the offshore contact center/BPO company to become the extended ‘nodes’ of the client’s own operations. This allows the client to exercise better control over the service delivery, which minimizes issues on security and resource availability and leads to better management of the client’s end customer experience.

Co-sourcing means that the client and the BPO vendor have joint ownership of everything that happens at the vendor’s site for thez customer. Even though the work is done out of a remote facility, the place, the people and the infrastructure are a seamless extension of the customer’s own environment in all respects. The relationship is a true partnership and not a simple contractual relationship. Both sides co-invest in all they do together, and the BPO vendor is an integral part of the customer’s organizational structure.

The BPO service provider is now more of a partner than a vendor, wherein the service provider’s people sit in on important committee meetings of the client, contribute to business plans while learning from theirs, and offering suggestions on how business could be run better. A good service provider can bring deep process expertise to the table thus significantly value-adding to the customer’s business processes.  

So, what does it help create? Very simply, a valued symbiotic relationship that serves the interests of both the client and the service provider—creating a co-sourced environment of excellence and commitment, where people excel not because they are told to but because they are given the necessary orientation to do so. This is very critical for the success of the relationship.

Critical Factors for Success
While cost savings is the initial driver, the relationship must go beyond that and focus more on the strategic part of a customer’s long-term plans.

• The partnership must be for a 3-5 year duration

• Executive sponsorship should be at the senior management levels, who own the relationship totally. It is not something delegated down to someone in the organization to run

• The service provider takes end-to-end responsibility for the process and executes on it completely, flawlessly and successfully.

• With the customer sending out mission-critical business processes to a vendor, co-sourcing builds in checks and balances to ensure that the possibility of default does not exist. This is also directly linked to the quality of people hired by the service provider, its infrastructure, the metrics it measures, and its eye for details.

Overcoming Challenges
BPO companies can adopt this model not just to minimize the risk perception that the client has on outsourcing his process but also leverage this model to add further value to the client operations. Another important aspect is that BPO companies are able to better manage their rapid growth by creating dedicated mini-customer teams which grow at the pace defined by the customer but without the organizational bottleneck challenges that rapid growth throws up. Moreover, the BPO company, as an active participant in the process, gains valuable knowledge base.

However, one key challenge in the co-sourcing model revolves around the size of the operation being offshored. The larger the size and higher the number of people outsourced, the greater the benefits. If the size of the project is small, dedicated teams and infrastructure add to costs, making the delivery more expensive for the client.

At Daksh, we address this to the degree allowed by customers and other process considerations, by cumulating smaller processes and dedicating resources in a step stage linked to scale allowing even the smaller processes and clients to leverage this model.