December 31st, 2008
Social Media Outsourcing: The Onshore vs. Offshore Decision
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Ann All at IT Business Edge agrees that there is a strong case for outsourcing, and even offshoring, parts of social media especially B2C monitoring, given that the offshore work force is proficient in the language spoken by the client’s customers.
She is concerned, however, that working with social media is based on human relationships and such outsourcing would demand not only strong communication skills, but a clear cultural affinity.
She is concerned that the same concerns that are leading a growing number of Western companies to scale back on their offshore contact centers and move these services closer to home, will force them to go slow on social media offshoring.
I agree with Ann that offshoring, or even outsourcing, social media is not a trivial decision and it won’t work for everybody. However, for large B2C companies, the options will be to 1) not engage with social media at all or 2) outsource and offshore parts of social media.
Once a company has settled the first level “do in-house” (read “not do”) vs. outsource decision, it will need to factor in several considerations for the onshore vs. offshore decision.
For non-customer facing functions, like online brand monitoring the onshore vs. offshore decision will be a no-brainer.
For B2C customer facing functions like lead generation and customer support, the cost economies will strongly favor offshoring, in spite of concerns about cultural factors. I would argue that companies will be more willing to offshore social media than call centers because they will realize that most Indians are more comfortable with written English that spoken English, and social media offshoring will not suffer from the accent-related problems that call center offshoring suffers from.
As I have said before, B2B social media interactions are best handled in-house.
Update 1 (from comments): The type of transactions I’m talking about are simple business transactions. Someone writes a blog post titled “Lenovo sucks!” because they delayed his laptop shipment by four weeks. You don’t really need to be Shakespeare to say the you sympathize with him, that such situations are not normal, and a small gift in on the way, as a token of apology. The key is to define the customer support decision tree clearly. Once that is done, a fresh graduate in New Delhi can handle such transactions as effectively as a fresh graduate in New York. In addition, the hassled customer doesn’t want to build a relationship with Lenovo, he just wants his laptop to be delivered to him in time, and failing that, he just wants somebody in Lenovo to listen to him and say they are sorry.
