360° Vendor Management

Another Tale from “When You Don’t Have Vendor Management Governance”

As related to us by a reader.

Picture this: Your company has outsourced customer service for some products, but not all products.  You have a single vendor with over 1,000 seats dedicated to your operation.  These seats are located in several centers located in the USA (for reasons not important to this story).

Your vendor management team is made-up of a single person.  This person coordinates five different programs, handles contractual issues, reviews invoices, schedules training, manages quality, and sets the direction of the five programs.  Needless to say, this person is very busy and, quite honestly, overwhelmed.  No single person could perform this job.

One day, an internal customer service group who did not outsource their operations planned a team lunch to celebrate February birthdays.  However, 12pm-1pm is also the time when customer service team receives the highest call volumes.  As the team all wanted to celebrate together, they needed someone to cover the phones while they ate cake and ice cream.  Driven by hunger or the love of a celebration, the team made a fatal decision.

A few minutes before noon, after the cake and ice cream were set-up in a nearby conference room, the team’s workforce manager flipped a switch that redirected the calls to the vendor.  The phones went silent and the team rushed into conference room.  They sang happy birthday so loudly that other people in the building could hear them. They took the time to also observed a company tradition of sharing what they liked about each of their February birthday team members.  It was a great party.

Meanwhile, someplace else in the country, the vendors’ call center was completely inundated.  Service levels fell to 4%, abandonment reach 85%, and the workforce team was struggling to understand the reason for the high call volumes.  Worse yet, these weren’t their calls.  They had no training on these calls.  So, following standard procedure, once they recognized that a caller was in the wrong queue, the vendor’s agents would cold transfer the call into the right queue…which promptly routed the call back into the vendor’s queue.  Customers were irate.  The team director tried to call the vendor manager, but the vendor manager was in meetings and was unreachable.

Back at the client’s center, the happy agents returned to their desks and once everyone was ready, the workforce manager flipped the switch back.

Do you have a story to tell about vendor management gone bad?  Let us know.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 28th, 2008 at 7:40 am and is filed under Vendor Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.