Less than great expectations: Why do we accept less from offshore call centres?

"Offshore teams perform worse than onshore teams"

This belief is widespread in Australia, the UK and America. But it is lazy thinking, lazy thinking that stems from a poor understanding of what drives high performance, and dare I say it, bias.

I was talking to a friend recently (thank you Sean Francis ) about sources of difference between onshore and offshore call centres.

Reflecting, it made me realise how many deliberate choices are made that cause poorer performance offshore.

Poorer performance that is accepted, based in part on bias that expects less from people overseas.

So what are these choices?

1. Higher team sizes.

Offshore teams often have lower support ratios, sometimes by design, and often as a result of team size drift. If the team size is supposed to be 12, offshore this will often creep up to 13 or 14 to protect costs. Onshore this will often creep down to 11 or 10 to protect performance.

Less support = worse performance, slower speed to competency, higher pressure and higher attrition.

1. Salary and benefits.

A blue-chip company onshore will often pay 40th percentile or higher in salary in the local market AND give staff access to the same premium benefits they give all staff. Offshore they might pay at 50th or 75th percentile in the local market, with significantly worse benefits.

Lower pay = very different talent profiles, less experience with English, and more time needed to develop great leaders.

1. Leadership experience.

The most important role in a call centre is the team leader (TL). Onshore, a team leader typically has 4 or 5 years experience with the same company, diverse experience on projects, and possibly leadership experience outside of a contact centre, perhaps in retail. They are often older, which brings with it greater life and people experience, and they are in the TL role longer, typically the average tenure is 3 years or more.

Offshore, many team leaders have two or three years experience at the company, less project experience, if any, and often no external leadership experience. Average tenure in the TL role is often less than 18 months. These folks are typically high performers with great potential, but they come in with less experience, and they are promoted out sooner.

The same profile as onshore team leads exists, but they are in more senior positions, earning relatively higher pay.

The impact here is more nuanced. Less experienced team leads translates directly into results, but also means that most of the responsibility for performance and behaviour change moves up to the layer above, to group leaders and operations managers. This can be hard for onshore folks to adjust to.

1. Coaching and investment time.

Offshore teams typically get less time off the phone for coaching and training, including for new hires. They often have fewer breaks, work a longer shift, and are more tightly managed on adherence to a roster.

This has direct impacts on engagement, well-being, and performance, as well as attrition. I fear this is driven by distance and an "out of site, out of mind" attitude to offshore folks. Decision makers see the cost benefits, but do not see the impact to people.

1. Communication skills.

Now this is one where there IS a fundamental difference. Folks in offshore centres typically come to english as a second or even third language, albeit they are also more likely to be university graduates. But here, as above, we see the impact of other choices..

The majority of training, communication, systems and processes are designed by onshore resources, and tested first on onshore resources. Communicating to an English as a second language (ESL) audience is a specific skill, one that many companies don't take the time to build.

The result here, combined with the issues above, is observed problems with communication. Problems that are frequently written off (incorrectly) as inherent to an offshore environment.

With an agent pool of mostly graduates, we should expect communication skills to be as good or better, not significantly worse.

1. Tighter security policies.

Offshore centres often have tighter security policies relating to info security, including mobile phone bans or paper free environments.

This view may be controversial, but these are typically stupid, unnecessary, and counter productive. It makes work harder for honest employees, and doesn't actually protect against bad apples.

Onshore and offshore, the answer is the same. Hire good people, trust them, and put in place preventative and detective controls that actually work.

1. People focused policies and support.

There's been a major shift in recent years, as companies realise that mental health and well-being are essential to high performing contact centres. Onshore, this is translating into significant investment, with time, money, training, support and resources being provided to contact centre leaders and their people.

However, those resources are often not extended to offshore teams. Instead, offshore teams, whether captive or outsourced, try their best in a much more cost constrained environment.

To summarise, offshore teams frequently

• have less support and larger teams
• are paid less (relative to local markets)
• have less experienced leaders
• have less coaching and training time
• have resources that are poorly designed for english as a second language audiences
• are hamstrung by silly security policies
• get less support for their mental-health and well being.

All of these things are solvable, we have been solving them onshore for years. Even more frustrating, because labour costs are cheaper offshore, they are solvable at a lower cost offshore.

The fact that this situation is accepted, without challenge, raises questions around bias and why less is expected from, and less is expected for, people from overseas.

Sadly, this acceptance results in poor experiences for our offshore colleagues, and worse experiences for our customers.

Let me know what you think.

What's your experience working with or in offshore teams?

What differences do you observe between onshore and offshore centres?

Why do you think some are so willing to accept poorer performance based on location? Is bias (or even racism) a fair accusation?