This article on outsourcing in CIO magazine was definitely an inspiring one for me (see my previous post).

I assume the article was mostly about large corporations, since only a very marginal amount of smaller size companies could afford to embark into heavy benchmarking.

I could not help but notice that the article never mentions customer satisfaction as a major issue to benchmark, which I found interesting.

While I can appreciate the efforts of giant corporations to increase their bottom line, I am – as a consumer, somewhat frustrated to see that these efforts are usually directed toward an increase in profit, as opposed to as an increase in customer satisfaction.

I am often puzzled by the poor technical assistance consumers receive from large phone, cable, or credit card companies just to name a few. These corporations certainly do huge efforts to decrease their operating costs, but on the same time the quality has certainly not increased.

And it can even be worse. In some European countries like France, consumers who call the equivalents of our 800 numbers, are charged an outrageous 0.30 € to 0.50€ by minute even while waiting to be connected to a representative. So getting to a representative might easily cost 5 euros (6.5 dollars), which I find just insane.

The ultimate purpose of outsourcing should be for companies to provide their customers with MORE services of BETTER quality, not to keep cutting cost at any rate, even at the expense of their own customer’s satisfaction.

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I read an interesting article in the March issue of CIO Magazine. The cover page sets the tone for the article: “Are you getting a fair price on your outsourcing deal? Some vendors are making it harder for CIOs to tell.”

A few thoughts occurred to me upon reading it:

- First, the huge “company divide” that exists between large corporations and the rest of them

- Second, the new job opportunities that offshore creates in our country.

About the first point, my clients and I (as a provider of outsourcing services) would hardly recognize ourselves in such an article. SMBs and their suppliers — usually SMBs themselves, are inventing new outsourcing models that use totally different metrics to measure success and trigger alerts.

I will dedicate another post to the metrics used in benchmarking very soon, but I would not be surprised to see some of these metrics eventually adopted by larger corporations to benchmark their own contracts. I have no doubt that they would bring the flexibility and thus reactivity that seem to be missing in the methods mentioned in the article.

Regarding job creation, my comment is 2-fold:

- Every time I attend a networking event here (the Silicon Valley), I hear people complain about how difficult it is to recruit and retain good software developers. Obviously all our jobs have not gone offshore.

- In addition, and this point is well developed by Thomas Friedman in the “Word is flat”, offshoring is generating plenty of new opportunities. Look at this new benchmarking market that is already estimated to be a $ 200 M market.

The offshoring phenomenon happening in the USA now is by no means a sign of economic decline. It is rather a stage in our country’s growth. Handling it successfully (and positively!) will increase and reinforce our leadership. And I find it much better to be the economic leader of a wealthy world than of a broken one!

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