I guess it’s understandable that a conference attended by lots of keen, focussed contact centre / CX folk may be a little off-hand about outsourcing. However around 35% of businesses with contact centres outsource at least part of their customer-facing activities

“Why?” You may well ask. Well here are a few of the most common reasons I’ve seen clients cite as the drivers for outsourcing.

1. Cost Savings – this always comes first (main reason for 80% of companies who’ve outsourced say Gartner). This doesn’t always mean going offshore – if a contact centre has grown organically and not been invested in, then the business case for outsourcing can stack up pretty well without a location change
2. Focus on your core. Not your washboard abs – you’re focussing on the “core” business – let a specialist organisation worry about the contact centre
3. CX Transformation. Use the outsource providers’ expertise in developing the tools and strategies to improve CX. An outsourcer who can convincingly say “we use that technology, we can deploy it easily for you, so let us transform your contact centre and run it for you more efficiently and with better outcomes for your customers” can present a compelling offer.
4. Speed. Resource on tap, managing peaks, driving change quicker than you can do internally. Maybe you have a 6 week peak in volumes that means your centre needs to increase from 100 advisors to 150. You can’t staff up for it easily. Outsourcers will be set up to recruit and train 50 advisors pretty easily – especially if the end of your peak coincides with the peak starting for another client

“How” is the next challenge:

• Deciding on the operating model
• How to select and contract with an outsourcer
• How to manage them well

There is no universal panacea, each business will have different routes to follow.

So, when someone next makes a throwaway comment that “you could just outsource it”, remind them it really isn’t that simple!

Akina Consulting helps organisations establish, improve and transform their customer experience and operational capabilities through pragmatic, results focussed delivery

• design and implement new CX operating models
• improve operational efficiency
• deliver better outcomes for customers
• leverage and maximise outsourcing projects

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Here’s a case in point. How the, no doubt very expensive, attempted visit to my house by a gas engineer recently was, in no particular order, unnecessary, poorly managed and confusing.

On the doorstep the other morning I found a card and a letter saying that a gas engineer had visited, but got no answer.

The Card

The card was from National Grid Metering, with the date, time and an official-looking Job Number hand written on. As directed by the card I went to www.nationalgrid.com/metering “to contact us… to arrange another visit”. But it transpires that National Grid Metering doesn’t exist anymore and I was re-directed to National Gas Metering*.

The site had lots of information and photos of earnest-looking people in National Gas Metering hi-vis jackets and safety goggles, but it wasn’t going to help me with arranging a new engineer visit.

“Please note that we cannot accept work requests for residential or standard commercial meters from members of the public. We can only be instructed to attend a property or site by a registered gas supplier.”

So that was both confusing and a waste of time.

The Letter

I then moved on to the letter, which was co-branded both my friends National Gas Metering (the new name, so that’s something) and SGN (Southern Gas Networks). Bizarrely the letter was headed “Classified as internal”, although it clearly wasn’t! The letter explained that an engineer had called because my gas meter “… has been identified as needing maintenance work… essential for potential safety reasons”. That definitely sounded like I needed to re-book the engineer!

However, the letter went on to say “If your meter has been exchanged in the last 12 months, please let us know and we will update our records”. Had my meter been exchanged? Possibly. I know I finally got a smart meter last summer, before the display unit was unplugged and shoved in a draw after it sat there gleefully telling us how much more we were paying for energy, minute by minute! Did getting a smart meter count as an ‘exchange’? Presumably, but surely between them National Gas Metering and SGN would know, wouldn’t they? Hasn’t the utilities industry spent over a decade trying to meet government targets and persuade consumers to get smart meters fitted?

SGN offer three contact options – phone, email or text. I decided to call the SGN contact centre as it was still in opening hours. Oddly the call rang for 30 seconds and then went to voicemail. I don’t know how SGN has set up its call routing, but it would be very strange to only allow a call to queue for 30 seconds before sending the customer to voicemail.

The Text

Next, I decided to text them. Success! With 9 minutes I had a human-seeming response saying that as I had a new smart meter then “you will not need a meter exchange and I will update our records accordingly”.

So, after spending a chunk of my morning trying to make sense if all this confusion, I finally got an answer – and a rather depressing LinkedIn post to show for it. But I’m a sad customer experience nerd; most people aren’t. As it turns out there are no safety concerns about my gas meter, but how many people who really do need to have their meter replaced just give up when faced with this tangle of comms confusion?

The energy firms have had a truly traumatic couple of years at the consumer ‘frontline’, with business failures, soaring prices, erratic market intervention by government and millions of customers falling into fuel poverty. However, it seems that National Gas Metering and SGN are daily shooting themselves in the foot, generating customer contacts and confusion with every unsuccessful engineer’s visit.
And I can’t help thinking that if a contact centre advisor spent a morning with an engineer then all of these problems could be identified and fixed.

Sometimes the solutions are easy.

*Google tells me that National Grid spun off its metering activities to a new entity, earlier this year. It seems that they are using up all their old stationery before re-branding

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