Want Better Customer Service? Take the Pulse of Your Company
February 1st, 2012
By Rosanne D’Ausilio PhD
There is what we call a moment of truth when a customer makes a decision about you, your company, maybe even all companies in your industry, based on their interaction with anyone from the front lines up to and including your CEO. In those first three sentences, a customer determines whether their interaction will be a good experience, a bad experience, or a waste of their time.
When talking about customer service, customer satisfaction, and customer retention, you often hear that the best way to determine how you’re doing is to ask your customer. And that’s absolutely true. However, if you really want to know how your company is doing, ask your internal customer.
Is Mexico Finally Waking Up to This Key Concept?
January 30th, 2012
By William Gourg
The Greeks, 2,500 years ago, were onto something. Creating a concept such as synergy might have been one of their greatest inventions. Although the word has sometimes been overused and abused, synergy surrounds us nowadays. Synergies underlie mergers and takeovers, coalition governments, and civil society movements. More and more often we are starting to see public-private partnerships that promise the benefits of mutual cooperation.
Investment Data Reveals State of Interest in Latin America Locations
January 25th, 2012By Reshaad Durgahee
Lima, Peru: Surprisingly emerging.
In the period 2003 through 2010, Europe and Asia were the largest recipient regions of foreign investment projects in shared services and BPO activities, accounting for 46% and 29% respectively. Meanwhile, interest in Latin America has clearly been growing. The number of shared services and BPO foreign investment projects in Latin America rose year on year until 2010, when the total number of projects entering the region decreased by 15%.
India-Centric Management Consulting Does Not Meet Goals
January 20th, 2012By Stephanie Moore
When Forrester published its first Indian vendor consulting Wave in 2005, Indian vendors were just starting their journey into management consulting. At the time, none of these vendors could compete with traditional management consultants – such as Accenture and Deloitte – from a scale, brand, or experience perspective. Given the rapid growth that these vendors achieved in the pure IT services space, however, it seemed only a matter of time before they would challenge vendors such as Accenture in the IT management consulting arena. Six years have gone by and these ambitious Indian IT service providers are still trailing the traditional management consultants.
US Congressional Bill Would Penalize Offshoring
January 17th, 2012
By Peter Ryan
The US Congressional initiative House Resolution 3596 (HR 3596) is the most recent effort on the part of certain US legislators to inhibit the offshore outsourcing of contact center services. However, no matter how sincere the spirit of this and other previously proposed and similarly worded resolutions, Ovum believes such a law would badly hurt outsourcers and ultimately impact the US consumer negatively. Therefore, vendors need to come out swinging against such initiatives.
Insourcing Jobs for Americans: Can It Work?
January 11th, 2012
"Insourcing is a smart strategy right now..."
By Clayton Browne
President Obama hosted a White House forum today entitled “Insourcing American Jobs.” Executives from several companies spoke at the event, all representatives of businesses that have recently made major investments in the U.S. resulting in thousands of new jobs – many of them IT jobs.
The Five Ws of World-Class Customer Service Training
January 6th, 2012By Rosanne D’Ausilio, Ph.D.
The interaction anyone has at any level with your employees, including you, gives a customer an opportunity to make a judgment about you, your company, and all companies like yours. I’m not just talking about call centers here. All technical support or help desk personnel are included as well. As a matter of fact, anyone who is in the customer service business – period.
The preamble to the United States Constitution begins, ‘We, the people…” I feel strongly that we, the people, are what make the difference in life, both personally and professionally. But how does that relate to customer service?
Nearshore Marketing: How Do You Get Your Sales-Ready Leads?
November 22nd, 2011By Fernando Labastida
Imagine this: Suddenly 2012 has arrived. You’re happy because you’ve successfully completed all your projects for 2011. But you’ve got no deals in the pipeline. Scary scenario, right? It’s also a very likely scenario, and it happens to far too many Nearshore IT firms.
If Outsourcing is All About Savings, then Show Me the ROI
October 4th, 2011By Randy Vetter, Director, Alsbridge, Inc.
Your CFO walks into your office 18 months after you signed your first outsourcing contract and asks, “What happened to the savings you promised?”
To prepare for this question, hopefully you have created and properly staffed a Vendor Management Office (VMO) function that manages the contract, relationship, performance, and financial aspects of the agreement. But to be able to explain any discrepancies (or even better, avoid them) ask the following questions:
LatAm as Part of Cross-Center Strategy
October 3rd, 2011
By Eric Simonson
Everyone loves a good debate. And one of the in global services is whether the external (outsourced) or internal (shared service or captive) approach is the “best” strategy for a particular situation. While most large organizations are getting past the either/or mindset and focusing instead on how to best combine and complement the two as neither is clearly superior to the other, Latin America is the one service delivery destination in which I see North American organizations facing a quandary on this issue.
The answer initially seems pretty simple. Latin America and the United States and Canada are roughly in the same time zones. Further, travel times to Central America and Mexico are fairly short. And as a bonus, you get either Spanish or Portuguese language skills to wrap into a …
