Still Not Really Happy With Your Outsourced Customer Service?

Try Genuine Care & Radical Candor

Welcome back to part II of my post series about my journey to a better (outsourced) Customer Service. And what happened, when I lost that client attitude and tried genuine care and radical candor, instead.

You have not read part I yet? No worries, you can find it right here and I recommend reading it first. Because it kind of sets the tone for this post and the following. Want to know what people on LinkedIn are thinking about it? Check it out directly here.

In my last post I shared the thesis, that you are the only expert, that really knows, how you would like your Customer Service to be done. I assume you at least partly agree since you are reading this. Or you completely disagree and are just curious, where I am going with it this time. Both reasons to be here are great, by the way.

Interestingly enough, even though you contracted a BPO partner and are paying them more or less money for it, in the beginning you are also the only one, who cares for your results. The BPO partner will naturally care more for their goals. And no matter how good of a contract you have written and negotiated, those do not necessarily always fully match yours. But believe me, they are at least equally important.

Just a short detour to contract and especially price negotiations. Those are often times paving the way for your “relationship” with your vendor or partner. In short – if you pay cheap, you will get cheap. It can still work, but the cheaper you buy, the more you pay. Say what? Yes, you are paying more in effort, work, nerves and stress to supplement all you need, but are not paying for. Negotiators often times forget, that every outsourced program needs to meet a certain margin. So when a partner participates in a bid, two things are happening (simplified).

Firstly, the Finance group and the CEO define a margin a program should make based on the assumptions and demands you shared with your RFP (Request For Proposal). You are keeping your RFP super high level and vague? You will spend A LOT of time in the negotiations and will be surprised, how the costs are changing, when the partner finally really gets a first understanding of the true demand.

Secondly a negotiator will negotiate the contract with you and, depending on how important of a Brand you are or how urgently the BPO needs a new client, will make more or less concessions. Usually the negotiator is not the Operations Lead, that will run the show for you. It’s always interesting and stunning to see the things that negotiators promise to be feasible at a very low price point. I got bad news for you. They are not.

And so lastly a third thing is going to happen and it’s no fun for you. The Finance group now relies on the Operations Lead to make the margin they originally planned with, despite the much lower price the negotiator gave them. And the “cutting corners” game begins. It has to! And that is why you should be an expert yourself. And you have to have a lot of knowledge. Especially about the gap between planned and actual margin. Among a lot of other things.

Back from our little negotiations detour to “try genuine care & radical candor”. Why should you care about the gap? Because you are either going to have to fill it or you will suffer from it. Either way, you’ll deal with it. If you choose to care, the dealing will be strategic, organized and a lot less stressful. But you can of course also always suffer and complain. And choose to continue to really not be happy with your outsourced Customer Service. It is a choice!

You choose to care? Great, congratulations. Now let’s make that genuine care and not about yourself and your results, but the partner, their employees and their success. Like a true leader (not a vendor manager). Because like a true leader, the success of your team is your success. And if you really care about them, you can achieve, that they start caring for your results, too.

I always recommend a common understanding between you and your BPO partner and that requires you to have knowledge and stay informed in many important areas. Here are the main areas to focus on, when you are entering a BPO relationship:

1. The Contract. Especially if you have not been part of the negotiations, try to understand all terms and most importantly, how they will impact your partner financially / operationally.
2. Your Program. Seems too ridiculous to even mention, but I have seen many “partner manager” that had no clue how their program worked even high level. Close that gap asap, if you have it.
3. Your People Profile. What skills and person is most likely to be successful. Are there industries the partner should focus on when hiring or avoid etc. Share your companies internal experience if any exists.
4. Your BPO Partner. Sounds simple again but it goes beyond the things you can see on the surface. Who are your stakeholders as a person, not just as a figure on your project board. Make your own impression and build a relationship.
5. Their plan. How are they planning to approach hiring, training etc. and most importantly, how can YOU help. Especially if there are gaps due to the margin thing we are not talking about.
6. Challenges. Know all the challenges within the project be it Operations, Technology, Financials, Hiring etc. Be aware and provide your support.

Why should you care about who your stakeholders are or what challenges they are facing? Let me ask you a question. Are you by any chance one of these bosses, that thinks personal matters do not belong in the work place? Got it. Well, if that is the case, this will not work for you. However I would be surprised if being a leader of anyone or anything would work for you at all.

We are working with people and no one is able to leave their problems at home, not take challenges to heart etc. . And the more we genuinely care and know, the better we can support. And this does apply to third parties we are contracting as much, as it does to our internal teams.

In an outsourcing relationship, as I shared before, your goals are not necessarily a 100% match to the goals of your partner. But you still need them to achieve your goals. So you need to fully understand them (know your contract) and they have to, too. I always recommend “reading” the contract together and make sure there is a common understanding on all terms, goals, rewards, penalties and what is driving those etc..

Having such a session is not only important for the common understanding, it is also a trust building measures. Operations Leads are usually not too excited about the contract their negotiator has arrived at. And they are not wrong when they fear there is hidden traps and pitfalls with the goal “to get them”. We talked about the usual client vendor relationship experience in the previous post.

So if you walk them through all terms and share your understanding, this shows that you care for them to understand and that you want them to be successful in achieving their goals and yours. It’s the first step to getting them excited for your goals, too. Especially if, based on the knowledge you have acquired, you can connect your obvious goals to their less obvious, underlying ones.

Now imagine, something goes wrong. The partner is not able to meet a contractual obligation or a milestone you aligned. What now? As I said in my previous post, ask yourself, how you would react to that, if it was one of your internal colleagues / team members.

I personally think that there is no success, where there has not been failure also. You can’t make an omelet, without breaking eggs. So sure, you can be upset and complain, throw a tantrum (even though if you are not 3 years old, you might have passed your time on that one) or go rogue and escalate. The question is, will it help? Likely not. Unless you think managing with fear is a sustainable approach.

Try walking in your partners shoes instead. And maybe also try assuming positive intend. All leaders I know are preaching “assume positive intend” when they talk about feedback, team member’s work, contributions and mistakes. However, as soon as we talk about third party partners, there seems to be a different standard and negative intend or cutting corners are more easily assumed. I guess this can be true for both internal as external relationships. It’s healthy to be attentive, but it’s not healthy to always assume the worst. Neither externally nor internally.

What happened and how can you support? Being firm and clear about what needs to change, be done instead, corrected etc. and then being supportive in getting it done, has worked best for me. I am German so my feedback will be radically candid by nature. However, since I am coming from a place of caring, it also is paired with a firm and genuine offer to support.

Let me share an example I experienced and how genuine care and radical candor worked for me. In the project I described in my first post of this series, the company I am working for had invested to provide a lot of internal support to the partner. I approached the onboarding of that partner as if I was onboarding internal colleagues and that included providing resources for training and coaching the first batches for better first hand knowledge transfer.

My team and I told the partner to make sure their trainers would join the first training batches as all other participants and not to give them any other duties so they could become experts and certify early. Timelines are always tight and they would have to certify earlier than usually in order to run the next classes themselves. When those trainers entered our on the job training process and their first results came in, they were lacking behind. After a deeper look into their data we realized, they had not been focusing on the training and instead had been given additional duties. They had far less on the job calls handled, than the other participants and looked to not be able to certify on time. The next classes were at risk.

I was quite annoyed about this, especially since we had told them to avoid exactly this. I really was upset. For about 5 minutes. Then I asked myself the “what would I do if one of my team members had messed this up” question. And went to work. My Manager organized for one of the trainers we had assigned to extend his stay, together with some of the coaches for additional support. We would be doing this anyways, even if their trainers would certify on time just so they could co-lead and learn even more. I convinced leadership that this was the right thing to do, without even mentioning the certification / other duties issue. We got this, no need to escalate.

Then we scheduled a call with the partner to talk about the issue. They were quite apologetic and “owned” the issue without us having to say “told you so”. But of course we did that anyways. Because when you are NOT angry anymore, expressing your “anger” can be a powerful and successful tool to create the feeling of guilt and drive change. So we let the partner sweat for a couple of hours asking them to come up with a solution proposal. And then let them know we had their backs, had taken care of it already and were ready to move on.

We would not have done it that easily and quickly, had they not owned up to their part of the problem. But since they did, being supportive was the only right thing to do. Both trainers also certified on time and all following trainers did have very limited additional duties other than certifying. Remember, their results are your results? Why would you not care about how they achieve them?

So what did this support do? Are they now abusing our supportiveness and are waiting for us to come to the rescue all the time? Maybe. But what’s much more important to me is, they are not hiding problems and are trying to resolve them “the wrong way” by themselves without disclosing. Instead we are having a great degree (there is never a 100%) of transparency.

It was earned by trust and it helps a great deal to set and manage expectations with my Senior Leadership Team (SLT). If there is a potential problem, I know about it long before it happens, we have jointly thought about solutions and I have been able to give SLT a heads up including a solution. And that is, what SLT like much more than escalations and concerns. And that helps me earn trust once again. The trust of SLT that we got this and things are going well, even if things are going wrong once in a while.

So for me, caring is one of my top two values. The other is ownership and integrity. Yes that are theoretically two, but for me they belong together. I naturally care and I am curious. And the example above shows one situation, where it paid off.

Caring also helps tremendously with relationship building. You need a great relationship with your partner (not only in your personal life), for it to be sustainable and successful. I am meeting with my main stakeholders at least every other week. And when I do, I am not just talking business. I am aware of their high level family situation, if they struggle with their health, follow a certain sports team etc. . It’s no different than with my direct team. And we spend often times more time talking about these things, than we spend talking Business. I am sharing my struggles, too. It makes you relatable to be vulnerable. Again, no different from your direct team relationship.

The only rule is, the sharing person decides what’s appropriate to share and the receiving person what they are willing to “receive” and you do not cross the line your counterpart is setting. Ever. If you have someone that wants to keep it strictly Business, adjust your approach accordingly. Again, this is a trust building measure. I would always rather trust someone, that has shown genuine care in areas that do not benefit them at all than someone that only cares for me, when it helps them.

And with every single stone of trust you put into the foundation, you are earning the right to radical candor, too. I am a huge fan of the book by Kim Scott “Radical Candor – Be A Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity”. You can find it here at Amazon.com or in your local book store (not a paid ad!). This book perfectly describes my approach to leadership.

If you genuinely care, you will be radically candid. Radical candor makes sure you are very clear in setting the goals, expectations and feedback if things are not going well. When the Partner “messed up” with the trainers in our first batches of training, I told them it was stupid as it negatively impacted them. I also clearly showed them, how. I could have said “it happens, but you know, you should not have done it because we told you so”. But that would not have made the points I needed to make:

• You put the success of your future classes at risk, by not allowing your trainers to focus on learning. Those Customer Care Professionals might fail and you will pay with poor results and penalties.
• You will require additional support that you ultimately might have to pay for and that will come from your margin.
• I will have to be even more attentive to make sure this loss in your margin does not impact me, too as an outcome.

So yes, I used the word “stupid” and no one actually had a problem with that. Because I was candid and direct, but I also offered support with the solution. I made the experience, that in the US people are rather showing “passive aggression” disguised as a very polite and very, very high level feedback, than being candid and direct. Or they will flat out lie and not tell you what you need to hear to “not hurt your feelings”. The truth is more often than not, telling it like it is can be uncomfortable and they just do not care enough.

that the clothes they are wearing are two sizes too small. And that people are making fun of them behind their backs. They tell themselves it’s not appropriate and they do not want to hurt their feelings. Well, guess how hurt their feelings will be when they finally learn about the gossip. And than learn that you knew about it, but did not care enough for them, to tell them.

Telling them the uncomfortable truth instead and coming up with a solution i.e. let’s go shopping together, would be so much better. For you both.

But never forget, genuine care and radical candor are best consumed together. You need to be aware that, if you skipped the genuine care part, your feedback is nothing but a complaint. And complaints do not often lead to solutions. Feedback combined with support, does.

Sometimes in managing partners, people are inclined to use complaints to “keep them on their toes” or make sure they “do not get too comfortable”. Someone that is confronted with, often unwarranted, constant complaints, will just simply develop a deaf ear to them. Because no one can listen to complaints all the time and still take them seriously. Especially since they come without care and without clear guidance what needs to be changed.

How will you know if you are complaining? You will know if you care or not. If you don’t, it’s likely a complaint. Another sign of a complaint is the lack of clear examples and the absence of a description of the desired state. If all of these are missing, you are likely complaining and should not expect improvement as an outcome. The recipient of your complaint would not really know, how that should look like since you did not tell.

Aside from the fact that this approach lacks humanity, it’s a real relationship killer. So much so, that people will stop trying since they can’t get it right anyways.

We have lost our ability to be satisfied with our work and celebrate the small things. We feel ridiculous if we do as we are striving for the big accomplishment. But the small wins, especially in a new outsourced relationship are the stepping stones to the big goal accomplishments. If overlooked, they are not going to have the power they could, though.

So will you try genuine care and radical candor? I highly recommend it. And when you do, do not forget to be as candid and detailed with praise as you are with feedback for improvement. Many leaders are very good at being detailed about the development areas but for things that went well it’s usually merely a “good job” or “awesome job” or “well done” and my favorite “way to go”. Feedback is supposed to be a description of observed behavior to either reinforce a successful behavior or correct a not so successful one. How in the world can we achieve this with a complaint (lack of examples) or “way to go”?

I am sending at least one email per week to my Customer Care Professionals. They are working for the Servicing Partner, but are definitely part of my team. See previous post. When I am writing to them, I am trying to give praise and celebrate them. Sometimes I am “just” praising our great results. But more often than not, I am listing behavior that has led to these great results to make sure, this is reinforced. And if things are not going well, I am sharing what we can do differently. I am usually not saying what we did wrong, as that is not the behavior I want to reinforce. I wand to show a different path instead.

Would I just talk about the results being good or bad, it would show everyone, results is all I care about. So I am detailed with my feedback, I am sharing important updates, ideas, things that drove me crazy during the pandemic or how I am focusing on the things I can control vs. the ones I can’t. To show I care. Because I do.

For a successful outsourced relationship, I personally think you need to be a leader, not a vendor manager. And to be a successful leader, genuine care & radical candor are absolutely critical. So try genuine care & radical candor and lose that client attitude and see what happens next.

In part III I am going to share more practical examples that I think make the difference and will talk about the importance of “ownership & integrity” as a leader (partner manager or internal, does not matter). Stay tuned!

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