Today, global competition demands world-class customer service. To achieve this requires unprecedented agility, quality and performance from an organization’s contact centers. Operational and business managers must therefore be able to balance resources with current and future customer demand across the whole organization. Increasingly this requires the incorporation of outsourced resources, often from multiple organizations.

Outsourcers, whether in-country or off-shore, eneterprises need to be able to safely and securely delegate key management capabilities to their outsourcing partners otherwise businesses lose many of the cost benefits associated with allowing outsourcers to better manage their own resources as only they are able such as:

• Enabling the business to focus on its core business.
• Improved business agility – ability to flexibly increase or decrease customer service resources based on business demand.
• Reduced costs, both from exploiting the outsourcer’s operational efficiencies and scale economies, and, when combined with ‘offshoring’, from lower cost labor.

In addition, in recent years competition for business from contact center outsourcers has produced considerable downward price pressure on rates, further improving the economic equation for buyers of this service.

However, this pressure on rates, and hence margins, has also had an effect on quality, with the result that outsourcing has become a commodity item at the point of purchase.  To reflect this, organizations are changing their outsourcing strategies to balance internal, on-shore, near-shore, and off-shore operations to best serve customers.  They are also engaging with multiple partners to ensure competition for business and to ensure quality solutions appropriate for each brand/product/service line. But this development brings its own challenges, without the ability to comprehensively, safely and securely manage their own resources and contact center processes.
VIM addresses many of these concerns related to exploiting the benefits of contact center outsourcing:

• Full integration of an outsourcer into the virtualized enterprise.
• Safe partitioning of data/functionality to ensure outsourcers do not have access to internal/competitive data or resources.
• Insulation from outsourcer agent attrition by providing resource management functions.
• Visibility of agent information for real-time and historical analysis without the need for outsourcer intervention (outsourcer filtering of information, cost to provide information, etc.).
• Use of both real-time and historical KPIs to measure performance and adherence to Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
• 'Single Version of the Truth’ delivering for example a report focused solely on the contractual metrics and used by both the enterprise and the outsourcer for daily/weekly reconciliation.
• Provides clients direct visibility to both real-time and historical SLA adherence.
• Increased procurement flexibility by allowing outsourcers a partitioned part of the virtual contact center infrastructure.
• Real-time control over enterprise resources to control overflow to outsourcer(s).
• The ability to identify and segment customers and/or calls by business value or other metric, and determine the appropriate customer interaction resource to apply to it.

In short, the award-winning VIM9 enables organizations to be 'in control' of the full economic, customer service and business agility benefits promised by contact center outsourcing.