photo credit: mikebaird

Would you find it odd if McDonald’s outsourced their burger cooking to Joe’s Diner or Burger King? What about Global Burger Associates?

If they did so, would they know if the quality of their food dropped?

What’s my point? My point is that you don’t farm out core competencies.

While I hadn’t noticed it because I haven’t asked them for customer service help in years, Adobe recently posted an open letter to their customers about the quality of their customer service in recent times.

The letter discusses the fact that they have a new global services vendor and how they are quickly working to get this vendor up to speed.

Sad, really.

Not that outsourcing thing, though that is unfortunate – regardless of who is doing the work.

What’s sad is that this work isn’t viewed as important enough to handle it themselves, ie: with Adobe employees.

I’ve heard all the arguments. IMO, they’re all wrong.

As wrong as liver-flavored ice cream

Farming out your customer service and support to some other company is just plain stupid. Not only that, it ignores the asset that customer service and support are.

You just don’t farm out an asset like customer service to another company.

What data are they missing by outsourcing support/service duties to another company?

It’s possible that they have access to the database, but is it integrated with their own customer/order database?

Can their developers access this remote system when they need to find out what is causing their customers’ pain?

Can their developers meet face to face with the support staff when dealing with an issue of substantial magnitude?

I don’t know. Maybe. My guess is “sorta” rather than “No”.

But those answers would be “Yes” if they felt it was important enough to do it themselves.

Assets, not liabilities

If you have 5,000 customer service employees who can provide great care for your customers and your competition has 5,000 outsourced customer service contractors who can provide great care for their customers – who has the assets?

Who can leverage the skills they have in-house? Who is building a base of employees with in-depth product and customer knowledge? Aren’t those the people you want to promote in order to strengthen your company?

Not the outsourced one.

Customer service and support are not an expense to be outsourced to the low bidder, nor to that “premium global services” vendor down the street or across the globe.

They’re an asset to care for, leverage and tend to with the utmost respect, just like your customers.

No, it isn’t easy. If it was easy…anyone could do it.

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photo credit: Sarah606

If I only had a dollar for every time I heard someone say “I wish I could clone myself” (or every time they wrote it).

Maybe even a dime:)

It’s a pretty common thing for people to say. There are over 2200 google hits on that exact quote (ie: search google with ” on each end of the sentence).

Everyone is busy, but are they getting anything done? Probably lots of stuff. Stuff that lands in front of them like a TV commercial. “Oh, I’ll just deal with this because it’s in front of me”.

That sort of thing.

But what exactly are they getting done?

Maybe a more accurate question is “Are they getting anything done that actually moves them toward the goals of the business?”

“Anything” is probably a bad choice of words. How about “lots of things” or “as much as you expected”?

We could talk about distractions all day – but wouldn’t that be a distraction? :)

The point about today is cloning.

What work are you doing?

Think about what you did today or yesterday, or some randomly selected “average day”.

How much of that pushed you and made you think?

How much of it was something you considered real work, ie: stuff that required to you focus and that was something hard?

How much of it require your strongest capabilities as a business person – those things that you wouldn’t DARE let anyone else do?

Was that half of your day? One third of your day? Or maybe 20 minutes of your day?

I’ll cut you some slack and assume it was half of your day. I think the number is far smaller, but we can argue about that later.

If you worked for 8 hours on this so-called average day, then you spent 4 hours of that day doing stuff that presumably could be done by an administrative assistant, a freelance local web person, the local print shop, or an independent accountant.

Paying the bill

Yes, these outside vendors cost money. So let’s find a way to pay for it.

If you could increase (say by 50%) the amount of the work that you get done, would you make any more money? In the case of your average day, I’m talking about 2 hours.

Specifically, if you could get 50% more of that “real work, requires absolute focus, needs your strongest capabilities, really makes you think” kind of work, wouldn’t your business be doing a LOT better?

We’ll assume you get 50% more because nothing is perfect and even 50% is such a big number that you might even do better once you get a taste of it:)

Doing the math to find money

Using your average day, you just got an extra 2 hours of serious work per day.

Multiply that times 3 days a week. I picked 3 days because I’m assuming you’ll get this right perhaps 60% of the time.

Now multiple that times 40 weeks per year. I picked 40 weeks, figuring that you’ll not do this for 12 weeks per year given travel, vacations, sick time, conventions, chamber of commerce events, trade shows and other distractions that you’ll manage to come up with.

So, how much time did you just find?

Two times 3 times forty is 240. Two hundred and forty hours. 6 work weeks. A month and a half. 30 full days of work.

How much is that worth to your bottom line?

If you have employees, many of them fall into the same trap. What’s that worth?

Yes, it’ll cost something to outsource that other work or hire someone as an employee to do it – but look at the cost of NOT doing so.

Don’t assume that I’m suggesting that you outsource this work to someone in East Bananastan and pay them $0.12 an hour. This will pay off in spades even if you pay a local $50-75 an hour to get the right work done.

Will it make you more competitive? Will it improve the quality of the really important work your business does?

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One of the things essential to getting your business systemized and streamlined is farming out the stuff that you really don’t have any business doing. The key to systemizing work to external vendors is choosing the right vendor for the right job. IE: qualified, technically able to produce the work, has the right equipment, etc.

For me, printing is an easy one to farm out. But I didn’t always do that.

It’s a little like a 12 step program for me, as I’ve got several printers here, yet my printing still gets done all over the place:)

I have a duplexing B&W laser that I use for every day stuff, but I still don’t print the newsletters for my newsletter service using that printer. Tried that once (for mine, not for a client’s), let’s just say that was a bad idea:)

I have a fancy color laser. That sucker will eat up $500 in no time flat. 4 toner cartridges at $80+ each and a drum at $200+. Expensive to use, but it produces nice output in low volumes. But, it doesn’t print full bleed – ie: ink out to the edge – that’s something I go to a local print shop or online service for.

Local print shops work fine for simple jobs that don’t require complex data merges (IE: having “Dear Mark” printed on 1 postcard and “Dear Mary” printed on the next one). There are some other more sophisticated things that I avoid with them, but they do work well for my newsletters because those pieces are 1 color, use standard folds and don’t use elaborate papers, perforations or other services.

More often than not, when the job is outside the ability of those 3 resources, I’ll end up going with an online service for complicated printing jobs. One thing where this crops up repeatedly is large format printing. I found a nifty service that office supply stores started offering not long ago. They print pretty good sized stuff, though they are limited in size. Some of them even have nice online interfaces so you don’t even have to leave home.

When I’m involved in event marketing, I usually need the services of a sophisticated print service. Usually events involve poster printing, complex folding, special papers, tickets and/or seals, which are not the kinds of things that most local print shops are up to. Because I’m in a rural area, I go online to make the fancy stuff happen.

As you can see, there isn’t a one size fits all solution for me, at least for this type of work. I suspect you’ll find the same thing.

But – it isn’t just about printing. You’ll often find businesses outsourcing graphic design, web site work, and any number of other technical and artistic tasks.

What can you farm out that you just don’t need to be doing? Could be any number of things, just make sure it isn’t your core business.

That’s why you’re farming stuff out, remember…so you can focus on the core of your business.

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