WHITE PAPER
Putting the EX in your CX: Can
Culture be Outsourced?
Culture be Outsourced?
Part 5 of this Series navigates the choppy waters of culture
custodianship amid a Customer Service or CX outsourcing decision,
and how to land safely!
custodianship amid a Customer Service or CX outsourcing decision,
and how to land safely!
The connections between Customer
Experience (CX) and Employee Experience
(EX) are causal and inextricable. It’s tough
enough managing this on an in-house
basis. What more then, if you’re one of the
progressive businesses embarking on a
customer service or CX outsourcing
mission?
PUTTING THE EX IN YOUR CX:
One of the key drivers of CX outsourcing is that competing on CX is expensive, especially in terms of scarce human capital resources. It’s a key reason why there has been a surge in outsourcing customer care operations to specialist third-party providers to drive costs down, scale effectively, and especially, to access specialized CX skills and technology.Customer experience outsourcing has the potential for a disconnect between the outsourced customer service operations and the company’s overall brand, culture, and customer experience strategy. When customer service operations are outsourced, it can be more difficult for companies to ensure that their outsourced providers are delivering the level of service and support that aligns with their brand and overall customer experience strategy.
BPX: BRAND, PEOPLE, XPERIENCE
Understanding these challenges, iContact created BPX, a proprietary methodology delivered on our Xccelerate technology platform to manage the end-to-end outsource journey. BPX is premised in three fundamentals:- Brand
- People and
- Customer Xperience
For purposes of this paper, we unpack the People factor in BPX, and it’s here that the powerful links between CX and EX become increasingly clear. Within our BPX framework, there are two standouts on the people front:
- Culture: Peter Drucker’s famous quote ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’ rings ever true for CX outsourcing. Cultural alignment with
-
your outsource partner is at the heart of success regardless of how
effective your outsourcing strategy may be. Cultural alignment
transcends fluency in your company’s language or familiarity with
your local culture – the outsource partner should be seen as a
natural extension of your workforce – in other words, people your
company would want to hire and work with!
- People: Engaged and empowered employees play a crucial role in delivering exceptional customer experiences. Specialized outsource partners will have very specific and sophisticated capabilities that target the sweet spot of your Culture, Customer Value Proposition, and role Competencies to source, assess, develop, and coach high- performance individuals.
PUTTING THE EX IN YOUR CX?
Great CX is moot without a commitment to nurture and develop the people tasked with the delivery and management of CX – one cannot be achieved without the other. It starts with having a framework or blueprint that underpins the recruiting, training, measuring and managing of your CX delivery team.CCUBED, our proprietary methodology, provides such a blueprint, targeting the intersection of Culture, the Customer Value Proposition, and role Competencies to source, assess, develop, and coach high-performance individuals and teams.
The development of a high performance outsourced CX team has three distinct phases:
- Phase 1: Sourcing – using the best tools and measures to recruit the right people from the outset, who have the attitude and aptitude to develop a career in CX and service.
- Phase 2: Assessing and Developing – assessing and developing people with the skills and competencies needed to deliver on the brand journey and customer values. Phase two is about accelerating the journey, identifying areas of strength and weakness, and adapting training to close any gaps.
- Phase 3: High performance – Ongoing learning and development provides for the refinement of skills and competencies, creating well-rounded CX professionals who are deeply entrenched in your brand culture and customer journey, working as a natural extension of your own team.
During each of these phases, tools like the Future Fit Index – which defines 15 critical future fit skills needed in a world of continuous technology disruption – provides invaluable guidance, right from the sourcing phase to High Performance. Right now, the disruption facing customer service outsourcing and the CX battlefield is massive and existential, evidenced in the rapid confluence of digital channels, data and analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), automation and cloud services that now work in tandem with the traditional, voice-based BPO services. We’re already seeing a redesign of BPO services that incorporate more tech and AI, automation and hybrid work models with the traditional voice-based, people-led engagements. This disruption holds significant implications for the skills sets needed by people working in CX outsourcing.
Consider for example just three of the 15 Future Fit skills that would be considered core competencies for anyone looking to build a career in CX:
- Tolerance of Ambiguity – The degree to which an individual is comfortable with uncertainty, unpredictability, conflicting directions, and multiple demands.
- Cultural Adaptability – An individual's willingness and ability to adapt their manner of communicating, motivating, and managing across cultures.
- Growth mindset – the mindset that talents can be developed through hard work, good strategies, and input from others.
CX, EX AND TALENT RETENTION:
Talent retention is pivotal to the continuity of great service for customers, and the long-term development and retention of professional and specialised skills among your outsourced CX team. In assessing any potential CX outsourcing partner, pay special attention to their employee retention strategies, which should include clear career development paths, competitive compensation and rewards packages, employee engagement and wellness initiatives, and ongoing professional training opportunities. In the context of CX outsourcing, talent retention is closely intertwined with the employee experience, which in turn impacts your CX. Long-term employees have a deep understanding of the company's products and services, culture, customer relationships and industry trends, and they contribute to innovation and the continuity of business operations. By necessity, the approach of any potential BPX partner to EX must go beyond the simplistic measures of annual employee engagement surveys. It should be a deeply engrained approach to developing CX professionals who find job satisfaction, a sense of purpose, recognition and reward for one of the toughest jobs to do well and to do consistently – CX outsourcing. Rarely is there a single source for improving customer experience, but what we do know, from a CX outsourcing perspective, is that the BPX partner that prioritizes employee experience and talent retention will see higher levels of employee engagement, productivity, and overall job satisfaction, and this plays an outsized role in how successful your CX outsourcing journey will be.
