Picture this: You’ve just arrived in Mumbai, in great anticipation of your first visit to your new offshore call center. You drive for three hours on poor roads, passing sprawling slums and crawling through highly congested areas. Finally, you reach your destination! But it’s not what you expected...in any way, shape or form. It’s a warehouse with poor air conditioning, and inside the sweltering building, a would-be customer-service champion has his head on a temporary folding desk in frustration, barking at a caller with an accent that is barely comprehensible. Not exactly what you expected based on the service provider’s sales presentation, is it?

While the above scenario is the exception, rather than the rule, it’s precisely what happened on one site visit I took to India with the sourcing manager for a U.S. manufacturer that was trying to improve the customer-satisfaction problems his company had encountered for eight months after outsourcing to an offshore customer-service center, sight unseen.

You obviously can’t learn “insider’s details” about any offshore provider from an RFP or sales presentation. The only way to get a true, full picture is by taking a comprehensive site visit—before you sign the deal, during the evaluation phase. As with real estate or personal ads, what you’re told versus what you actually see can make all the difference in your decision.

The fact is, remote delivery centers with variant cultural backgrounds each have their own unique characteristics. The site visit is essential to ensure a service provider can deliver on its promise and support your distinctive requirements.

So what specifically should you look for on the site visit? Structure an agenda that enables each of your company’s function leaders to observe the service provider’s corresponding work teams on three prevailing factors: overall delivery capabilities, management of operations, and workplace culture. This article explains the objectives of the visit, questions to ask, and other tactics for gathering information, as well as examples.

Overall Delivery Capabilities

One of the most important objectives of the site visit is to build your confidence in the firm’s delivery capabilities, and the best starting point is simple: Compare the service provider’s delivery capabilities with the scope of work you expect. Shadow the work teams and watch how they handle the processes of other clients.

In a customer-service call center, for example, what criteria does the team use to escalate a call from one level to the next? A domestic call center may know the difference between a frustrated caller and an average New Yorker, but it’s probably not so easy in Krakow. Different cultures interpret nuances in different ways, so present the delivery team some scenarios and ask when they think the call should be escalated. This way, you get an idea of the service provider’s effectiveness in managing these challenges and ensuring your customers are served.

Another factor: Note how the service provider handles exceptions, those situations that stand to disrupt a process. In a perfect world, the client willingly transfers the necessary knowledge to the service provider so the information can flow freely back to the client. But how, for example, would the provider manage a client team’s resistance to transitioning a process? Ask the service provider for examples of working through internal commitment issues with other clients.

Consider the offshore infrastructure. This refers in part to the ergonomics of the operation: Is it a cave, for instance, or does the look and feel of the facility uphold the professional standards of your company? Is it accessible by modern transportation? Also note the scalability. If you wanted to put another 500 people in the facility due to increased demand, where would they go?

But scalability and infrastructure go beyond the physical design. On one recent site visit, a company disqualified the prospective provider because the training infrastructure wasn’t sufficiently built out to accommodate the 630 software jobs earmarked for transition to India within the next year. Sure, the service provider could probably hire that many people and place them in cubicles, but the transfer of client knowledge requires new employees to be trained in a new environment. It takes time for the knowledge to become capable, and the offshore provider’s training infrastructure should take this into account. Companies like Wipro and Accenture have placed an emphasis on training as a part of scalability.

Finally, overall delivery capability is significantly influenced by safety and security. Clients should ensure procedures for disaster recovery and business continuity—as well as data privacy and security. Talk to the people who are in charge of the business-continuity plans. What scenarios are tested and how often? How would the provider’s response to an emergency impact your operations back home?

What To Assess During The Site Visit

Overall delivery capabilities Work effectiveness Infrastructure and scalability Safety and security Management of operations Management team Language and cultural barriers Hiring and retention Workplace culture Synergy among work teams Long-term realities Quality assurance

As for security, one of the best barometers is your own visit to the site. How much access do you have to the operation? Can you walk around without a badge? Can you see clients’ information on computer screens? Observe the procedures for security and privacy, and you’ll get a good read on how secure your company’s processes will be. For example, are printers easily accessible and in the open? Are there ways that employees can download data? In many cases, offshore providers have excellent security processes that exceed U.S. standards, but there are cases in which they don’t. Finally, determine whether the work environment is comfortable and safe. How does the service provider treat its employees? Are there cafeterias and break rooms? Safety and comfort speak to the service provider’s ability to attract and retain the best employees in that country.