Reshoring call centres from offshore locations

Over the past few years, there has been a number of high-profile organisations who have announced their plans to bring call centres back to the UK.

Although the headlines gave the impression that this was a trend, there were still more call centre jobs being offshored than brought home. This has changed during 2016 when there is now a major move to bringing call centre jobs back to the UK and a dramatic drop-off of jobs being offshored.

The devaluation of sterling has also made it easier to justify the move from a financial perspective. For many organisations, offshoring has failed but a number of organisations have also struggled to reshore work.

Fortunately, there are a number of commonalities between those organisations which have succeeded in doing so and those which have been less successful. So, what do you need to consider before bringing work back onshore?

The first thing to do is to examine what your customer service needs to look like now. In the 10-15 years since companies started to offshore at volume, call centres have changed dramatically.

The availability of low-cost staff overseas has meant that many organisations have not felt the need to investigate this. Many of those companies which didn’t offshore have invested time and money into the automation of transactional type activities.

In an ideal environment, this should be implemented before the work is brought back onshore but in call centres, we rarely live in an ideal world.

Prior to starting the move back onshore, there needs to be a detailed situation analysis. For example, during the period that the work was offshored, you are likely to have lost a lot of internal skills and knowledge which is likely to cause issues if you intend to bring the work in-house rather than move the work to a UK based outsourcer.

When doing things offshore, it’s fairly easy to move at scale in a relatively short time-frame. In The UK, it’s more difficult and if you have a large operation, it’s often better to have a phased move back. If you don’t, then there are typically increased risks to the quality of agents, management or service levels.

It’s also important to appreciate that the UK economy and labour market has changed over the past 10-15 years. One example is the increased number of Europeans living in the UK who bring their language skills with them. This may provide an opportunity to centralise European operations in the UK.

On a more local level, there may be large companies which have established operations, expanded them, reduced them or even closed them and this presents opportunities or threats for finding local talent.

Another important lesson many have discovered is that process failures are often masked by offshoring. When things aren’t going right, it’s a fairly easy option to blame “offshoring”.

If you then try to bring the work back without ensuring the process is functioning correctly, then the challenge will not go away. However, if you do have the process right, reshoring work is an opportunity to develop innovation and true transformation.

Offshore providers are typically weak at innovation compared with domestic UK providers and so you are likely to see significant improvements in efficiency and effectiveness if you handle this correctly.

The landscape of the UK call centre outsourcing industry has also changed over the past decade. Some companies have gone bankrupt, some have grown beyond recognition and some are now part of Indian, European or American global giants.

There are also some very talented domestic providers which have sprung up. When reshoring, many companies use the same provider in the UK as they did offshore. This seems logical as it should allow you to maintain some of the skills and knowledge but the anecdotal evidence is that this is often a mistake. Whatever you ultimately decide, it’s definitely worth assessing the full UK market before making your move.

In conclusion, reshoring is now a more viable option than ever before. The above points are simply the top-level and there are many more things to consider if you want to do this right.

Whilst it may seem important to rush things through, do not underestimate the impact of good analysis, planning and process optimisation.