Outsourcing the Care of Your Most Important Relationship

CRMguru published an excellent article on the options of Outsourcing your customer relationship. It's by Corinne Steer of Edify. She does a great job of discussing the various issues surrounding the decision to outsource your customer care and customer service.

It's a volatile subject, fraught with politics and ideology, communities effected by the decisions, friends and families, geopolitics, balance of payments, lifestyles. "Data Warehouses" full of data have been published on the subject.

Here's what it boils down to for me: Would you outsource the care of your most important relationship? Be that relationship with your spouse, parents, children, lover, family, friends, pet, sports team. Would you hand off the care, the interaction, the headaches, the expense to a 3rd party provider who would update you on stats and figures, etc? 

What relationship is more important for a company than that with its customers? (Employees, ok.) What asset is more important for a company than its customer base? (employees, right again) Why would you hand off this most important relationship, the one that creates your brand, that drives your revenues, that determines your costs, your income, your bonuses to people who have no vested interest in the relationship?

Would you hand the care of your children to an overseas provider whose contract lasts for a year or two? Ah, but it'll save you so much time...and money. And what will you have at the end of that 2 year contract with the outsourced provider? Well, you'll have created someone who doesn't recognize you as their parent.

And in the same way after 2-3 years of care by an outsourced provider you'll have customers who don't recognize you, either. You handed off their care to someone who doesn't speak the language, doesn't care about the long term health of your company nor its customers as you don't care about them (hence the terms of the contract with the provider), realizes you chose them because they're cheaper and the labor laws are more lenient.... So why should they recognize the name of your company any more.

Oh yes, they'll remember your company name. And they'll add 'they didn't care about me so I cancelled my service.' immediately after it.

If you don't want your most important personal relationships to 'cancel their service' with you, then you don't hand their care to strangers. And why would you do it with your customers? I mean after all it's about the relationship. They can find your product anywhere. What people yearn for are relationships that add value to their lives. To the extent your company gives that to your customers, you'll have a successful company. Outsourcing isn't the way to build on your customer relationships.