CONVERGYS THOUGHT LEADERSHIP SPEAKER SERIES: As the cost to serve customers escalates, in-house customer care operations struggle to compete for internal resources and budget and to keep the business competitive. Now what?

At a public affairs seminar on the outsourcing industry in the Philippines, hosted in Manila by the Financial Executives Institute of the Philippines, Convergys Corporation (NYSE: CVG), a global leader in relationship management, shared its insights on how companies can benefit from customer care outsourcing and avoid the pitfalls of choosing a poor outsourcing partner.

Speaking on “The Pros and Cons of Outsourcing,” Marife Zamora, Vice President and Country Manager of the Philippines for Convergys, discussed the many benefits of customer care outsourcing including greater freedom to concentrate on core competencies, greater access to advanced technology without capital investment, greater accountability, and greater capacity, flexibility, and scalability to meet unpredictable periods of high and low demand and to address different customer contact preferences.

According to Ms. Zamora, companies with in-house customer care operations are finding it increasingly difficult to economically and efficiently address the new reality of customer relationship management in the twenty-first century. Many are finding that the complexity of serving customers today surpasses their capacity to do so, that their research and development costs for new technologies to support their agents and their customers is unsustainable, and that the challenges of hiring, training, and keeping talent are a constant demand on their internal resources, especially as requirements rise for multiple language and high-technology skills for today’s agents. More importantly, these challenges are threatening the ability of the internal operations to support differentiation through the customer experience and help keep the business competitive.

The presentation provides case studies to illustrate how three companies used outsourcing and technology enablement to improve care, reduce costs, and drive greater value from their customer relationships.

Questions addressed by the Convergys presentation include:
• How do I truly compare costs to determine whether outsourcing reduces my total cost of care?
• How do I address my concern over loss of control and the potential for quality problems?
• How do I make sure our brand and revenue growth is not negatively affected when outsourcing customer care?