According to an oft-quoted industry statistic of indeterminant attribution, approximately 80% of all outsourcing contracts fail to meet expectations. And factor in the comparable stat for captive centers (also illusive as to source) of 50% and, to use the vernacular, “there sure are a bunch of unhappy campers out there.”

Are these numbers really an accurate reflection of the success rate of global services implementation? Or are they rumors that result from a lack of verifiable evidence? Is the root cause of this failure to meet expectations an inability to achieve cost savings, or is it a result of disappointment in the quality of delivery? Are global services customers so disillusioned and unhappy, or has industry lore substituted for fact in the absence of rigor in definition and measurement of customer satisfaction?

“Nobody is doing it well [measuring and effectively managing customer satisfaction],” proclaimed an industry expert at a recent SharedXpertise training session. And he's right — there are no industry standards for customer satisfaction in the global services industry. Without baselines and benchmarks, no JD Power of the offshoring and outsourcing industry, promulgating measurement of delivery performance and descriptions of supposed discontent can easily take on epic proportions.

Good Customer Service

To which benchmarks should customer satisfaction aspire? In the absence of protocols that yield reliable evidence, informal reportage reflects the extremes, and far too much weight is ascribed to the experiences of those vocal, unhappy campers. In a vacuum of context, all feedback appears to be negative.

Transitioning service delivery from a vertical employment model to a contractual (internal or external) relationship changes the balance of power and associated roles and responsibilities. But measuring the drivers of that balance is left out of the change. The management of customer satisfaction often starts and stops at the drafting of the outsourcing contract or the internal services specification. Inserted as a de rigueur clause, most providers and clients pay lip service to the need to measure and manage effectively, yet very few expend the effort and cost to take a pre-transition baseline and implement much more than informal mechanisms on a casual basis. And, internal services operations cannot boast a better track record. As internal operations are increasingly compared to offshoring options, captives have no choice but to increase the level of commerciality with which they treat their customers. Staff monopolies simply no longer exist.

Many relationships think they have a customer satisfaction program in place. Other relationships go a step further, using such devices as annual pulse surveys to assess the voice of the customer in order to identify areas of dissatisfaction, an early warning system to suggest potential problems. Few invest in the implementation of structured programs linking service-level agreements and key performance indicators to customer perception, linking value and satisfaction and enforcing new ways of working.