TP to be included in more UK government procurement activity

I am delighted to announce that Teleperformance UK has been awarded Lot 5: The provision of Contact Centre Services for Direct Response Marketing and Related Services for the Government Procurement Service (GPS) Framework.

This means that Teleperformance will be included in future Government procurement activity for Contact Centre work.

Government Procurement Service (GPS) is an executive agency of the Cabinet Office and the Framework agreement supports the Government’s aim to deliver significant, sustainable savings for the taxpayer by centralising, standardising and aggregating procurement spend for common goods and services.

GPS have placed four companies (including Teleperformance) on Lot 5 of the Framework.

Teleperformance UK already delivers critical and successful customer support programmes for many central government departments including Home Office, Department of Health and Environment Agency.

I believe this is fantastic news that Teleperformance has been awarded a GPS Framework. We strongly believe that this Framework will quickly become the preferred route to market for government departments wishing to procure Contact Centre Services.

We have been working as a Trusted Partner to Government in the UK for nearly 20 years.  Our work for the public sector is often high profile and requires the ability for huge capacity flexibility. It also accounts for over 25% of our UK business.  Our appointment to the GPS Framework will help us to build on this very important and hugely successful part of our UK business.

If you have any questions about this Lot 5 announcement then please do get in touch with me or Julia Gibbs. You can find our details here:

 

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How did we promote a business before social media?

Social media is fast moving. What works today might not work tomorrow because trends shift so fast and new systems become available on a regular basis.

Who can remember how popular Bebo used to be in Europe? Or Orkut in Brazil? Or myspace just about everywhere? Myspace is trying to make a comeback as a music platform, but other music platforms have emerged and it’s likely they have missed the boat for any resurgence in popularity.

These were dominant platforms that ruled at one time and yet almost all have been pushed aside by the Facebook juggernaut, which continues to grow though a bit slower now most of the people who want Facebook already have it.

But think for a moment about the bigger picture. How far out do you plan your company strategy? Maybe it is just a year in advance – based on the budget cycle? Or maybe you differentiate between your branding, which can be planned years ahead, and your regular marketing, which is planned from quarter to quarter, and your customer service which might just be changed and improved on an ongoing basis.

If we are thinking about branding and why people are interested in your company then that strategy can be planned regardless of which social networking platform you are using to communicate with potential customers. There is no Facebook strategy, there is only a communications strategy and Facebook may well play a role within that – or whatever comes along five years from now and replaces Facebook as the dominant social networking platform. It may be Google+ or it may be that Facebook has evolved and remains the leader – nobody can predict where we will be.

Sometimes it is worth looking back to the near past to see how we planned our business life then. Look back just ten years and think about how you were working at that time. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter… none of these sites existed. But we still had to communicate and interact with our customers. If so much has changed in the past decade, can you just imagine where we will be a decade from now?

 

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Is the rock-star analyst dead?

Hfs Research always like to shoot straight from the hip with their opinion on the way the industry analyst business is changing so it was interesting to see their latest blog post on the death of the rock-star analyst.

Everyone knows the rock-stars. They are the industry analysts that are so well known their positive or negative opinions can directly affect the value of the companies they write about.

As Hfs notes, the problem with the individuals becoming famous is that the analyst firms want customers to buy their branded analysis – not the research of an individual. And the obvious danger for the analyst firms is that if it is the analyst – not the firm – whose opinion is so keenly sought then what happens when they are tempted with a better job offer?

There is an interesting market developing in the industry analyst marketplace. Social media is making it possible for individual analysts to develop more of a name for themselves by blogging and tweeting their thoughts. Most big firms are being careful about this with their employees, but it does allow the respected individual analyst – probably ex-big-firm – to publish and have an opinion that is potentially influential.

But there is still value in the brand. This market is really a lot like the publishing business. Every individual writer knows they can publish a book by pushing the content to a blog, to the Amazon Kindle, or to an on-demand publisher like Lulu. However, there are not many success stories from self-publishing – the big successful books still tend to be published by major publishing companies – they can offer the support and marketing required to get books in front of people.

I personally expect the analyst business to follow this lead. Large firms that don’t embrace the more social flow of information will wither and die, but it will still be very hard for lone individuals to be truly influential – the influential analyst brands are not going to disappear just yet.

 

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How can you manage a crowd in real-time?

I have always been interested in the psychology of group behaviour. Why do groups of people behave differently to individuals? This is something that’s very important in our business – working to represent brands to to public by managing their customer service centres.

And it is becoming more important today because behaviour that used to be individual – calling to complain or ask a question – is becoming more open and transparent. Any complaint made on a social network has the potential to be copied and broadcast by large groups of people instantaneously.

This has led to an increase in snap decisions about service quality. If a group of friends see that you have provided fantastic service then they will very quickly tell a lot of people. Conversely they will also very quickly tell a large group about your poor service – often before the person who originally complained has had a chance to deal with the brand directly.

I can see how the advertising world has started adjusting to this world of the instant decision. The 30-second TV advert now feels extraordinarily long to the generation watching YouTube for fun. YouTube ads are on screen for 5 seconds before the viewer can click to bypass the ad, which is leading many advertisers to throw everything they have into the first five seconds of a commercial – just so the viewer will keep watching.

Customers are really changing fast. They want immediate information about products, they want immediate service when they have questions, and they can tell their network immediately about your poor (or good) service. This is all a far cry from the days when customer service meant a small team of people answering the phone – this is now managing crowds in real-time.

 

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Paying for what you use: nothing more nothing less

One of the key trends in outsourcing that has generally been led by the public sector – rather than private – is the move towards outcome-based-agreements. But as contracts are increasingly written with payment tied to outcomes, the supplier community needs to be more open about their real abilities from the start, not once the contract has been won.

As we all passed through the difficult recent years of the global economic slowdown there has been some interesting analysis performed on how companies are reacting to different business trends. Gartner has observed that many suppliers offering their services based on payment for outcomes have noticed that business is better than average – even when they have been generally facing a slowdown.

Both suppliers and buyers have a lot to gain from more outcome-based agreements and the reasons are obvious in the current climate – you can share the gain when times are good and share the pain when times are hard.

But outcomes and causation can be hard to agree on. There have been examples of companies using share price performance as a desired outcome. It sounds logical, if the share price is performing well then the supplier must be doing a good job for the client, but in many cases the supplier might have no influence over their client’s share price at all – a company running your IT helpdesk for example. Why would they be rewarded or penalised based on your share price if their actions don’t directly influence that measure?

Outcome based agreements work well where the supplier can take over an entire process and then price that process, rather than the component parts – the headcount and infrastructure required to deliver the service.

It does make contract negotiation a lot harder, as a period of parallel running may be required to calibrate the supplier prices, and it does need a greater sense of respect and trust between the client and supplier.

Respect and trust are two attributes we are lucky to enjoy with many of our clients and new channels to customer support – such as social media – are changing the way it is measured. I expect to see many more companies exploring how to buy or sell their services based solely on outcomes in future.

 

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Your mess for less *or* the buck stops with you

Outsourcing is often confused with procurement or purchasing, because many of the same drivers influence these strategic decisions. Both involve efficiency planning, cost reduction, comparing the price of various suppliers. It’s easy to see how the two disciplines get confused. But they are very different.

If you are procuring post-it notes from another firm, you agree on the price, quality, and amount of items, then you procure them. That’s the end of the relationship, except for those annoying stationery catalogues that will be sent for evermore.

If you are outsourcing a business process your company presently performs to a supplier then you are effectively lifting up the boundary wall of your company and rebuilding it around the supplier. Yes, they are still a supplier and are just contracted to provide a service, but to all intents and purposes they become a part of your supply chain, and therefore, an integral part of the service you offer to your own customers.

The oil spill caused by a BP rig explosion a couple of years ago off the southern coast of the USA is a textbook example. Several contractors were involved in the errors that led to the explosion and subsequent disaster, but as far as the media and politicians were concerned it was BP’s mess.

BP could have turned around and blamed the contractors they had working in the area at the time of the explosion, but would anyone have listened? When a firm contracts another to deliver a service there is an operational transfer of responsibility for delivering that service, but the accountability for making sure it works is not transferred from the client to supplier.

The buck stops with the client. Even if they paid a supplier to deliver a service, it doesn’t mean they can blame the supplier when it goes wrong. This is an important point to remember if you are considering the use of outsourcing as a way of sorting out a messy or disorganised business function. The supplier might sell their services as ‘your mess for less’, but the mistakes will still be your problem when they occur – both in terms of actual liability and reputation.

 

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LinkedIn is 10 today!

LinkedIn is ten years old today. Happy birthday to what has become the biggest and busiest business-networking site on the Internet.

Let’s take a moment to just consider how different the web was just a decade ago. Most people were still using dial-up modems – remember those? Of course it was possible to get broadband and a wifi router at home a decade ago, but it was still not very common.

Blogging had been developing for a few years. Blogger was launched in 2000, but it was still seen as a niche pursuit. Let’s face it, some business executives still see it as a niche pursuit today!

If blogging was new, social networking was really just in its infancy. Facebook and Twitter did not even exist and Myspace was only launched in 2003 – it rose to prominence then collapsed as Facebook grabbed all the attention.

But Myspace launched the careers of bands such as the Arctic Monkeys and Lily Allen. 2003 was still a time when a new band could get signed by a record company with a fat advance and support to go touring the world. People still bought records back then.

And now LinkedIn has been around for all of that decade. When it was launched I found it an annoyance as the moment I updated any of my details, salespeople would swoop on my profile and email attempts to sell me anything and everything. That has changed – now it’s become an essential business tool. If I ever run out of business cards today I just offer to connect on LinkedIn – and I’ve got friends who just don’t even bother with business cards now.

So do join me in wishing a happy birthday to LinkedIn. A decade ago we were on dial-up modems and Facebook didn’t exist. Can you imagine where technology will be a decade from now?

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