"Lady, that's not in my workflow"- or how sourcing gets in the way of customer service

If youâre tired of hearing all the rants in the media about outsourcing by folks who donât have a clue about the difference between shared services and outsourcing and offshoring, take heart. There actually is a journo out there whoâs moved beyond the concept of "in" or "out".

If you have the opportunity to read Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlsteinâs brilliant column entitled "Help, heâs drowning in rules ," youâll understand a dimension of the sourcing phenomenon that most of us in the industry are missing. Pearlstein posits that itâs rules and technology that allow us to hire lower wage personnel â offshore, implicit âwhich prohibit exercising discretion. As he says in the article "their [outsourced employees] only job is to follow rules, stick to the script and leverage the experience and expertise that are embedded in the system."

Now Iâd like to pick a tiny bit of a bone with Mr. Pearlstein. While outsourcing is certainly rules-based, so are effective captive operations. And location has nothing to do with it. When you pay people to perform rules-based work, any defect â such as spending more time dealing with an unusual customer issue, or chasing down a missing cost code, or cleansing a file â impairs productivity, in turn negatively impacting cost. But he goes on to say that, "If you want discretion and judgment, if you want workers who really understand and relate to customers; if you want the flexibility necessary to respond to individual needs or unforeseen circumstances, then you can go back to paying twice as much to have your own, longtime employees doing the work. Thatâs the outsourcing trade-off. It may be a good trade-off â most of the time I suspect it is. But it is an unavoidable trade-off, no matter how good the contractors or their systems."

So back to my theory that sourcing of any stripe gets in the way of customer service. Sourcing succeeds when there are rules, scale and standardization, not when there is variation and customization. Yet not every business or customer issue can be resolved by following a work flow. When the capability equation that supports sourcing is predicated on low cost employees who can easily be trained to follow rules to a "T," it follows that the exceptions must suffer. Unfortunately, itâs never the norm that gets a bad name, itâs the outlier issues for which no one has a solution, because, in Sigma-speak, the defects per 1000 (read: frequency of incidence) are not the norm.

The implications of good customer service, whether itâs business to consumer, or business to business, is based on the outliers, not the stuff that works. Yet our sourcing models are focused on the rule, rather than the exception, so we install technology that precludes out-of-the-box thinking, and hire and train folks whose experience and expertise do not help them cope with variation.

For outsourcers and shared services operators, itâs a risk worth taking, even in the face of poor voice of the customer scores and angry consumer tweets.

So the next time your customers are frustrated with your sourcing modelâs ability to solve their problems, think about the fact that sourcing is predicated on workflow thatâs driven by rules and employees who were not hired for their capacity to make judgments.