Is this New Delhi?

	BEST PRACTICES

Whatever you do, choose your site carefully. “The physical location of your contact center is a consideration because you want to be physically present to have your offshore CSRs recognize you as the client and feel some connection, loyalty, and responsibility, toward you and your company.”

Frequent videoconferencing may “be a great way to get around the time and travel hurdles,” Kislik adds.

	Here are some other tips:

• Be prepared to invest time and effort.
• Check references.
• Listen to live calls. Creative Irish Gifts often reviews random recordings, Rauckhorst says. “We queue and review all of their orders so we're able to catch any obvious errors,” she says. And if the customer has a problem? The offshore agent can add notes to the order or put the order on hold. “If a customer refuses to call our customer service for further assistance, it gets e-mailed to us and we follow up with the person,” she says.
• Look for companies with experience in serving catalog clients.
• Be certain that the center can support your needs. There's no point using a firm that will be overwhelmed in a crisis.
• Select the host country wisely. It's preferable to consider countries which the population is Westernized, where the labor force speaks American English, and where there is a familiarity with American culture. It also helps to chose a country in which there is a favorable attitude toward Americans in general.

	Dark Days for Offshore Service?

Kathryn Jackson, Ph.D, founder of Ocean City, NJ-based contact center consultancy Response Design Corp., shares a recent experience with an offshore call center.

On this particular dark and stormy night, the rain had been falling for days; the Northeast U.S. was flooded. Internet sites were down. Call centers were overrun with needy customers accustomed to self-serving on the now-crippled Websites. I was one of these customers.

I know it's ironic that a contact center consultant is phone adverse, but I would rather self-serve on the Internet than call a company. So when I needed to order a new piece of luggage for an upcoming trip, I went straight to the Internet. But the site I wanted was down, so I had to call.

At first, I could hardly hear the agent because the weather was interfering with the line quality. Even when I was able to hear him, I could not understand what he was trying to say: His English was bad.

Determined to spend my money, I told the rep I wanted to buy a $400 “wheelie,” and I had a coupon to apply to the purchase. He took my name and item number, then he gave me an order confirmation number. I was a bit startled. He had not asked for payment or shipping information.

I asked if he worked for the company, explaining my question by reminding him he hadn't ask for seemingly required information. He confirmed that he was an employee rather than an outsourcer or temporary worker, but that he worked in El Salvador.

“We don't usually get these calls, but our U.S. call center needs help so they are sending some customers to us,” he said. Truly a dark and stormy night, for him and me. Frustrated with the poor connection, line quality, language, and sales process, I told him I would hang up so I could attempt to reach a U.S.-based call center and agent.

These days, we talk a lot about offshoring. We write about the potential pitfalls (such as accents) and obvious benefits (such as costs). We discuss how to align the offshore strategy in order to benefit the company's value proposition. My recent experience taught me we still have room to grow: Our customers expect us to perform rain or shine.