Culture, Conflict and Where Value Fits In
December 1st, 2009
By Danny Ertel, Co-Founder and Joe Bubman, Consultant, Vantage Partners
Complex outsourcing relationships are always difficult to manage, but the unique characteristics of offshore deals complicate the challenge. Some early concerns about offshoring, such as political uncertainty and tax issues, appear to have become more manageable with experience. Others remain, however, with one rising above the rest, according to hundreds of participants in Vantage Partners’ “Managing Offshoring Relationships: Governance in Global Deals” study: culture. And the way customers and service providers manage culture has a direct impact on the value they achieve in their deal.
What do we mean by culture?
Companies nearly always encounter different organizational cultures when entering into strategic relationships with external partners. After all, companies have different strategies, structures, risk positions, capabilities, and norms, and when the deal is more than a simple buy-sell transaction, those …
Outsourcing to a Better Bottom Line
November 19th, 2009
By Jeffrey B. Andrews, Thompson & Knight LLP
Why is outsourcing such an effective strategic tool? Quite simply, outsourcing provides companies with a proven means to increase their profitability.
Yet just as with any long-term service relationship, problems are inevitable. Disagreements over the scope of the services, static pricing that fails to remain competitive, and the service provider’s failure to deliver promised innovation and performance improvements can lead to increased costs that erode the profitability gains achievable through outsourcing. To address these problems, customers should include provisions in their contracts that comprehensively define the scope of the outsourced services, provide for service evolution and continuous improvement, and provide for pricing resets tied to changes in market prices.
No contract can ever completely set forth all of the functions and responsibilities being outsourced.
Carefully Define the …
Searching for Skilled Multilingual Agents
November 18th, 2009By Jeff Pappas, Executive VP, Arledge Partners Real Estate Group
What is a “Multilingual Call center”? Well, one that provides services for various languages, apart from the global language, English. When a US based BPO requires a global presence, then it is pays to obtain services in different languages like Spanish, German, Portuguese, French, etc. Providing services in different languages will improve upon the service quality, expertise and experience of the contact center.
Many contact center services, including inbound, outbound, order fulfillment and other activities are provided by multilingual call centers as niche marketing.
A BPO could save upwards of 25% or more on the operating cost to run a Portuguese center outside of Brazil and Portugal.
Language Complexities
Successful BPOs provide services to their customers in the language which is well-understood by them. Thus, it is difficult to establish a multilingual call …
Seven Essentials to Latam Site Selection
November 17th, 2009By Susan Arledge, President/CEO, Arledge Partners Real Estate Group
Latin America is becoming the venue of choice for call center relocations as the industry continues to seek low cost English solutions. So, if you are considering opening operations in LATAM, here are Seven Essential Questions that you should answer before making this type of investment:
What is the size of the labor pool in the area that I am considering?
What are the risks of skill shortages and saturation by other call center competitors?
Is there sufficient bilingual labor in the region?
Which countries have ongoing English training programs?
LATAM is not a homogeneous region – each country has cultural differences. What is …
Q/A: Lack of Marketing Savvy Hurts Latam in Web 2.0
November 11th, 2009As Latin America emerges as a significant player on the worldwide outsourcing stage, questions are coming up around how well Latam sourcing providers are marketing themselves. With US buyers looking for knowledge and insights, providers need to step up their digital marketing capabilities, says Fernando Labastida, owner of Latin IT Marketing, and a leading expert on marketing practices in the offshore industry.
We sat down recently with Fernando to get more of his thoughts.
What do Nearshore service providers need to do to improve marketing practices in the digital age?
For lack of a PC term, they have to look and behave American (or European or Canadian, depending on which market they’re going after).
1. They have to have modern, user-friendly, straightforward and to the point websites with flawless English. No more flash websites. No more “good enough” translations. No more typical corporate websites with information about their company, their wonderful reliable, expert developers who know Java .NET, SQL Server, Oracle, IBM and can develop anything from an iPhone app to an add-on for SAP.
2. They need to start blogging, creating eBooks, making videos, do webinars. They essentially need to take a content marketing approach, because that’s the best long-term strategy to turn their web presence into a destination and become thought leaders.
Building a Demand-driven Strategy
November 11th, 2009
By Chris Nuttall, PA Consulting Group
“Location, location, location” has been the cry of nearshoring advocates and advisors for many years now.
Choosing the optimal location for nearshored services based on factors such as language and labor capabilities, risks, rewards, macroeconomic stability and government incentives has resulted in a plethora of options for any US organization looking to nearshore its processes and activities.
This has resulted in captives, shared services, outsourcing deals, joint ventures and other equity-based structures with both service providers and large corporates investing heavily in setting up new and expanding existing delivery centers. In short, the nearshoring supply side has exploded in scope and scale across the Western Hemisphere with competitive options across Canada and from the Rio Grande to the Southern Cone.
Driving Sustained Value
Yet, this is often the wrong way to think about how to drive sustainable value from …
Destinations that Rise Above the Crowd
November 9th, 2009By Anupam Govil, Chairman, Global Sourcing Forum + Expo
The world is not only getting hot, flat and crowded (as Tom Friedman would put it), but it is also getting very, very competitive and homogeneous. Currently more than 100 countries lay claim to having some sort of outsourcing industry in their region, leading to a very crowded market with almost indistinguishable service advantages. Emerging destinations face significant challenges in establishing their credibility, defining their value proposition and differentiating themselves from their competition.
In every regional cluster, one or two countries usually shine and emerge as strong global outsourcing hubs, such as Costa Rica and Chile in CALA; Egypt and Morocco in North Africa; and Poland and Czech Republic in CEE.
There are many reasons why a country becomes the “preferred” location for the sourcing community, but no …
By Kirk Laughlin, NSAM Editorial Director
I always enjoy reading the various recommendations that come out from industry experts 
about best practices in outsourcing. Some of the advice is intended to be truly independent and unbiased and that’s the kind of material we’re often looking for at Nearshore Americas.
Other times we see “experts” arguing a specific point, but in reality they have a hidden agenda and the tone of their advice favors that agenda.
Call Center Case Study: Dialing Up the Caribbean
September 24th, 2009NSAM Call Center Insider
It is no secret that call centers in the Caribbean are fast finding 
customers in North America. As a Senior Manager of Fulfillment for a US-based business media company, my job was to make sure that I helped serve the telemarketing and audience recruitment needs of my company and our clients.
The decision to begin assessing Caribbean call center operators was simple. We simply weren’t getting the value we required out of American and Eurasian call centers (cost, competencies and reporting were all being scrutinized) and it was clear to us we needed to make some changes.
Guatemala and Cost Competitiveness
September 15th, 2009By Jeff Pappas, Executive VP, Arledge Partners Real Estate Group
Central America has become a hotbed for call center investment as US based
contact centers continue their aggressive search to find the most cost competitive Spanish/English bilingual support for their clients. In English speaking countries, Central America is considered a region of the North American continent. Politically, it usually comprises seven countries – Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama.
Though Guatemala is a developing country with the largest population in Central America of around 14 million inhabitants, the country still faces many social problems and is among the 10 poorest countries in Latin America. The distribution of income is unequally high with approximately 29% of the population living below the poverty line.
Still Guatemala has its advantages. Here are some facts:
The professional workforce speaks English relatively fluently. Interestingly, per year, …
