Building Relationships Beyond the Hand-off   by Jim Hoen   A recent post on CRMAdvocate notes that with help-desk outsourcing contracts, an improper hand-off is what kills a lot of deals. It’s true that any problems with a deal become apparent during the handoff, but it’s not the handoff itself that’s the problem. There are any number of issues that can sour a relationship, including poor expectation setting and lack of trust. Following are three examples of issues that we’ve encountered in our 20-plus years of delivering outsourced technical support to companies around the globe. The good news is, for each issue addressed, we have lessons learned – expertise in dealing with these types of situations has helped us turn many difficult situations into spectacular results.   Remember the 80-20 rule. We signed a major help desk outsourcing contract with a global manufacturing firm, and launched into agent training. We assumed that our customer was training us on the most common incidents until the day we went live, and struggled to answer user calls. It turns out that the customer gave us excellent training, but on a variety of proprietary applications and other issues that made up the least volume of user calls. We ended up going back to the drawing board to retrain agents on the issues that would have an immediate impact on customer satisfaction. No outsourcing relationship will be perfect right out of the gate, but if you start with what you know you need right away – the 20 percent of the issues that drive 80 percent of the calls -- your partner can build knowledge over time. That company is still a customer today, and has renewed its contract with us several times.   Trust your partner. In another major help-desk outsourcing deal, our solution began to take on a new shape outside of our original intention because collectively we lost sight of the original vision. The customer chose us specifically because we have an excellent track record of eliminating waste and inefficiencies in help desk processes by centralizing support. But, between the time we negotiated the contract and the time we went live, the emphasis changed from “centralize” to “customize.” While we managed to centralize resources together under one roof, we still had up to eight individual help desks at any one facility. We completely lost the economies of scale, efficient practices, and knowledge sharing that we were brought in to deliver. The problem was one of trust – once the customer allowed us to develop processes that delivered the benefits, things turned around 180 degrees. Today, that company is not only one of our largest customers, it has significantly expanded its scope of work with us, because we have driven tremendous amounts of cost from its IT support programs.   The Support, Not the Contract, Should Rule. We did lose one contract, but not because of quality of service or cost issues. During the seven years that we maintained and effectively renewed the contract, we only missed one of the nine different service levels more than three times. The service levels were very strict and, to an extent, at times contradictory. Collectively, we tended to spend more time administering the contract and measuring things that didn’t focus on improving the closure or call deflection than driving cost out of the system, or gaining access rights to solve more incidents. The contract ruled the support instead of the support defining the satisfaction of service. At the end of the day, the customer decided to bring its desk back in house, and to sacrifice cost savings for the ability to respond to its constantly fluctuating service-level requirements. Moral of the story: bargain hard for what you want, but don’t fault your partner once you get it. We often exceed contract requirements to keep customer satisfaction high, but no one can afford to give service away.   The bottom line is, in any contract you will experience problems in implementation. Even the most experienced outsourcing firms cannot anticipate every bump in the road. Rather than focusing on the unachievable goal of perfection, focus on finding a partner that can work with you to resolve the problems that inevitably will occur. That’s the way to build a long-term relationship that benefits everyone involved.   Jim Hoen is VP of sales and marketing, North America, for TechTeam Global, an infrastructure support services company based in Southfield, MI. If you have questions, reach Jim at jhoen@techteam.com.