Business journals and consulting firms are always advising companies to use outsourcing as a business strategy. This orthodox approach to corporate strategy has been around for decades, but was really codified in 1994 when Gary Hamel and CK Prahalad published ‘Competing for the Future’.
This book, from Harvard Business School Press, gave us the theory of ‘core competence’ which basically means that if someone else can manage your payroll or IT better than you can do it yourself then pay them to do it. This frees up your time and resource to focus on what you can do better than others – your core competence.
A recent example is this feature in Forbes. The article offers five tips on how to more effectively outsource your business processes. They are pretty simple guidelines such as making sure the management want to do this and defining your goals before starting the project, but the point is that these tips are now just a part of the conventional wisdom – very few managers ever question this guidance.
But what if you are managing your business processes around customer service? What if you don’t want to outsource to a partner company for a number of reasons? Maybe you want to keep a tight control on quality, or maintain your corporate culture when talking to the customer, or just ensure that the interface between the customer and your brand remains internal?
Contact centers don’t automatically need to be outsourced. If you are managing your customer service processes internally and then seeing articles like this in Forbes and wondering if your strategy is correct then there are other options.
GigCX allows you to retain control internally, but with the flexibility to manage costs and maximize efficiency. You can scale up and down as needed, so a flexible e-commerce company that has always struggled with Black Friday no longer needs to worry. The answer doesn’t have to be outsourcing to an enormous contact center specialist, retain your team in-house and work with a GigCX model.
The LiveXchange platform is a great example of what is possible. You can use the platform to onboard and train new agents and alert your pool of agents to shifts that are available – controlling the shifts down to each 30 minutes. Your agents are working from home and because you can control the recruitment process you can ensure that they support and engage with your style of corporate culture.
If your industry, or even your own company, has fans or social media influencers then you can even approach these people – ask the influencers if they want to help customers of the brand they already love. They don’t need to do 40-hours a week in a contact center, they can just do a few hours a week if that’s all they want to contribute – it’s entirely flexible. They can become brand ambassadors.
The point is that you can use the platform to build a virtual contact center that brings your existing agents together with a pool of GigCX agents that flex up and down as needed. They are your recruits and you manage them all. There is no outsourcing required and yet you can still build more flexibility into your customer service processes.
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