New cloud contact center technology is making multisourcing a powerful customer care solution by addressing key challenges in managing vendor diversity and balancing customer satisfaction with cost savings. Features like multi-channel integration, cost and billing granularity by vendor, management delegation, intelligent call routing considering SLA commitments, and prompt messaging flexibility help overcome issues like desktop variations, visibility into costs and performance, and independent vendor control. Regular communication is also important to set expectations and ensure collaboration between multiple outsourced contact center vendors.

1. The New Model for Multi-Vendor Customer Care

2. Contact Center Challenges
Your customers are increasingly multi-
channel, mobile & geographically
dispersed
Your competitors are investing in system
upgrades and technology
You have budget constraints

3. Overcoming Challenges -
Cloud Contact Center
• Avoid capital investment
• Decreased total cost of
ownership
• Decreased reliance on
internal IT resources
• Ongoing technology refresh
without additional
investments and forklifts
• Ease of scaling
• Locate agents anywhere
• Redundancy

4. Overcoming Challenges -
Agent Outsourcing
• Lower labor costs
• Decreased costs/effort for
hiring, training, scheduling, and
managing a team of agents
• Improve overflow call handling
• Access to languages / skills
• Access to established worforce
optimization benefits

5. Outsourcing Growth
“Both shared services and outsourcing are on the increase. One in four enterprise buyers are reinvesting heavily in their
global shared services operations, while seven out of ten are continuing to make (largely moderate) investments in their
outsourcing delivery. This is driven by technology advancements and automation and the rampant globalization of
enterprise supply chains and business ecosystems”
Executive report: The State of Services & Outsourcing in 2014
“Many companies’ internal CCS-related capabilities have declined over the past several years as budgets have
been continually reduced and requests for technology investments and upgrades have been denied. This in part
has fueled the near double-digit growth in the market for outsourced services during the past four years. Today,
22 percent of all contact center services spending is for outsourcing.”
CONTACT CENTER OUTSOURCING
A Peak Time for Contact Center Outsourcing: Why Recent Developments are
Making Outsourcing the Right Decision for Some Companies Today

6. What is Multisourcing?
For Contact Centers:
• Use of multiple vendors who’s
agents are deployed,
frequently in a cloud contact
center model, to answer calls
and messages.
• Each vendor has a contractual
relationship with the cloud
contact center “owner”, not
the caller / message sender.
Multisourcing is the disciplined provisioning and blending of business and IT services from the
optimal set of internal and external providers in the pursuit of business goals. - Gartner

7. Multisourcing Pros & Cons

8. Multisourcing Pros
• Geographic Coverage – Multiple vendors may be required to cover your dispersed
customer base. Regional presence and expertise as well as “follow the sun”
availability come into play.
• Language / Special skills – Regional presence may make it easier to acquire agents for
specific languages and experience.
• Cost benefits – Locating agents in less costly labor regions addresses the highest cost
associated with contact centers.
• Reduce vendor risk/reliance – Spread your risk across multiple vendors.
• Price negotiation – Makes it easier to compare and contrast pricing between vendors
for comparable services.
• Performance incentives – Competition between outsourcers can help to push overall
performance metrics.
• Agility – Possible to manage a diverse pool of agents within a loud contact center
infrastructure as a virtual resource with cost flexibility.

9. Multisourcing Cons
(Beyond agent consistency, training and business issues)
• Diverse systems – 3rd party vendors have their own systems, especially agent
desktops. You can’t expect standardization across multiple vendors.
• Performance visibility – You need KPI accountability by vendor to ensure quality,
monitor costs and pinpoint bottom line contributions.
• Contractual obligations – Many multisourcing deployments involve call volume
contractual obligations required to achieve cost savings, thus putting the reins on
complete call transfer flexibility.
• Management independence – Outsource vendors usually demand some level of
control if you are going to hold them to performance metrics.
• Intra-outsourcer competition – Your team of outsourcers are frequently comprised of
natural competitors. Expect to manage evidence of distrust when you need your
contact center outsourcers to work to together, especially when transferring calls and
messages from one vendor to another.

10. New cloud contact center technology is making
Multisourcing a powerful customer care solution
Key Challenge – Managing Vendor Diversity

11. Challenges - Vendor Diversity
Desktop variations - Especially with the agent are a primary source for
inconsistent customer care. It gets more difficult if some of your
vendors cover a range of communication channels while others may not.
It is highly unlikely that you will be able to dictate uniformity.
Where are the $’s going - Pinpointing your costs down to the vendor
level is another challenge. Will your systems allow you to maintain
billing integrity by tracking costs by vendor?
Each vendor wants some degree of management control – Your contact
center vendors will press for some level of queue management and
control over their agents’ pool. You also need to ensure that each
vendor does not have visibility into another of your multisourced
vendor’s network.

12. Resolve the Desktop Dilemma
Multi-channel integration within popular
CRM systems deliver consistency for calls,
chat, email and other channels of
communication across vendors.
Multi-Channel
Media Bar

13. Cost/Billing Granularity
51
13
8
51
Solutions allow traffic to be “classified” by tags such as vendor name or contact center
identifier. This translates into drill down detail for billing and allows you to compare vendor
costs head to head.
Queue Status by vendor

14. Management Delegation - Vendors
Some cloud contact center solutions provide management delegation with the ability to
“firewall” against extending control beyond a specific network. For example, VoltDelta
makes it easy for managers to define “sub-management” for any of their multisourced
vendors as shown below:

15. New cloud contact center technology is making
Multisourcing a powerful customer care solution
Key Challenge – Balancing Customer Satisfaction
with Cost Savings

16. Challenges – Balancing Care & Costs
Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) for volume – You would like to
automatically transfer calls from a busy contact center to agents
managed by another vendor who are available. However, you have
SLA’s is place that ensure specified call volume for each vendor. Do you
keep callers on hold when there are agents available within your
multisourced network?.
Transfers to agents - Are you setting your agents up to ask callers to
repeat information if there is a transfer from an IVR or from another
agent?
Messaging flexibility – Can you adjust audio instructions and IVR menus
within your multisourced environment? The ability to flexibly manage
expectations of your callers by messaging for hold times when calls
surge, or when transfers to agents managed by other vendors will work
to improve customer care, especially when agents are busy.

17. Transfers Mindful of SLA’s
There is a way to balance customer care against SLA commitments.
VoltDelta’s CareFlex feature makes it easy to transfer calls between
multisourced vendors, with consideration for SLA’s. Managers can
configure queue transfers up to an overflow/underflow percentage
that could correspond to SLA tolerances or established expectations.
An example of this screen is shown below:

18. Agent heads-up & DIY Messaging
Agent heads-up – When transferring a caller from an IVR, you can
provide a recorded segment of the conversation for the agent to review
prior to connecting. Agents can also conference in each other to pass
along detail prior to connecting with the customer.
DIY messaging – Some cloud contact center systems are making it
easier for you to quickly make changes to IVR prompts, menus and even
dialogs. In a multisourced environment this prompt flexibility to add
floodgate messaging for surges or inform the caller to hold a bit longer
as the call is transferred to another contact center will keep caller’s
engaged and improve satisfaction. VoltDelta’s Content Manager
facilitates immediate changes with pre-recorded audio or TTS within a
“do it yourself” framework.

19. Cloud Contact Center
Any multisourced contact center is only as strong as its weakest link. Its hub and spoke
call/message distribution to multiple contact centers demands reliability and security at
its core. Key characteristics to evaluate include:
Reliability metrics beyond “brochureware” – Question uptime statistics
with call volume at the forefront. Look for 99.99% reliability at call
volume measured in the 100’s of millions of calls per year.
Surge Performance – Look for cloud contact center vendors that can
point to customer situations where unexpected call volumes were
encountered and resolved.
Security – A foundation for high security sets the tone for a
multisourced infrastructure. An independently certified PCI
environment establishes the standard for multiple contact center
vendors that you are working with.

20. Establishing Vendor Expectations
Although the focus of this SlideShare is on new
technology facilitating multisourcing, you must
remember to not overlook the expectation
setting, management and reporting
requirements of your multiple vendors.

21. Your Vendors’ Perspective
What makes the aforementioned technology options attractive for multisourcing is
that they take into account what is important for each of your vendors.
Some Degree of Management Autonomy - It makes it easier for them to
manage their agents with some degree of autonomous control.
SLA Protection - They will know automation is in place that works to
improve customer care while maintaining their SLA’s if you implement
transfers within SLA tolerances utilizing systems that prove performance.
Visibility by Vendor - Management and billing integrity means they
know they will be held responsible for what they can actually control.

22. Vendor Communications
The foundation for multisourcing success requires clear communication between you
and your vendors. In many cases it also demands “coaching” to encourage the intra-
vendor communication necessary to ensure that you will actually achieve a virtual
contact center infrastructure. Key points to consider include:
• Infrastructure – You can make it easy to deploy a multi-channel solution as, but do
all of your vendors have compatible software and systems? Ensuring that each
vendor is up to the required software revision makes a big difference.
• Training – Are your vendor agents up to the task of handling specific types of calls
and messages, especially when transferred from another of your vendors?
• Goals – Make sure that your outsource vendors are clear on your service goals.
Outline exactly what you are looking for in the area of customer satisfaction and
how you intend to measure it. Address your cost goals as well to promote
consistent service between vendors.
.

23. Vendor Communications
• Process for intra-vendor problem resolution – Confront the specter of finger
pointing from the start. Establish a framework for problem resolution particularly
for situations including dropped calls / messages between your outsourcers,
customer complaints regarding inconsistent service, and reviews of calls and
agent screen recordings when customer interactions span diverse outsourcers.
• SLA expectations – If you have SLA’s in place especially for volume, you have to
set expectations on how you will automate queue transfers to ensure customer
satisfaction. Knowledge by all involved that automated transfers up to tolerances
due to queue backup will make it easier for all of your vendors to work together
by focusing on customer satisfaction.

24. Vendor Communications
• Scheduled communication – Regularly scheduled communication between all
parties involved sets the table for problems resolutions as well as for service
optimization.
• Supplier replacement – Having a team of outsourcers that works together is
certainly the goal, but expectations must be set that components of the group can
change without renegotiation with the incumbents.

25. Conclusion
1. A multisourced agent population can deliver significant benefits in the areas of
customer care flexibility, agility and cost savings as long as your technology
integration and business requirements are understood and in agreement across
all parties.
2. New systems are now available that make it easier to deploy multisourced
customer care Key among these are the ability to maintain performance
visibility and billing integrity within a cloud contact center deployment, and
automation that enables queue transfers with consideration for SLA
commitments.
3. Now is the time to review your contact center strategy to determine if you can
reap the benefits of a multisourced environment. Take advantage of the cloud
contact center agility to aggregate a team of outsourcers to deliver next level
customer care with costs savings that delivers a competitive edge.
.

26. About VoltDelta
VOLTDELTA IS A CLOUD-BASED CONTACT CENTER PROVIDER WITH 35
YEARS OF EXPERIENCE.
We perform intelligent, data driven contact management to optimize
your customer's journey. VoltDelta rapidly tailors and integrates our
multi-channel contact center solutions to enable you to increase
revenue, boost retention and reduce operating costs with proven
scalability and reliability.
The information contained herein is provided for information purposes only, is intended only to outline (VoltDelta’s) presently anticipated general technology direction and is therefore subject to change.
The information communicated is not an obligation to deliver any product, product feature, service, service feature, software, software upgrade or functionality and VoltDelta’s version of the (Hosted
Solution operating system) may vary. None of the information should be interpreted as a commitment on the part of VoltDelta.
www.VoltDelta.com
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