While a significant number of companies and industries continue to consolidate business processes and services into captives or global in-house centers (GIC), analyst reports show the retail industry saw a 4% drop in new GIC setups last year. Although the reasons were not given, current macroeconomic headwinds combined with the fast pace of tech evolution is prompting retailers to focus on their core, making strategic business process services (BPS) partnerships more appealing compared to making major investments in their in-house centers such as customer care centers.

These BPS partnerships play a critical role in helping organizations to reduce costs, improve efficiencies and tap into specialized expertise to help enhance the customer experience, while allowing them to remain focused on strategic growth and innovation. For any brand, choosing to outsource key business functions is not simply about choosing a partner. It’s about orchestrating an entire metamorphosis of business operations and processes.

As Everest Group notes in a recent study supported by Teleperformance, fast-tracking this transformation requires organizations and BPS providers to engage together in a more deliberate level of strategic partnership management – one in which providers are focused on outcomes and meeting organizations’ current and future needs to provide the highest level of customer satisfaction.

Unlocking Long-Term Value through Strategic Partnership Management

Given today’s shortening technology innovation cycle, we’ve found that our partnerships with enterprises help them optimize business functions to better achieve strategic goals. Organizations increasingly work with seasoned, experienced global partners such as Teleperformance to co-create solutions, leverage synergies, share best practices, cross-refer customers, and more. Key benefits include:

• Co-innovation to support ongoing incubations / experiments or proof of concepts. Partners can serve as an experiential hub with a dedicated team to help demonstrate proof of value. Business process services partners can also leverage their experience with similar organizations to help apply best practices and share what has been working in your industry.
• Reducing management overhead by delegating some of the management and oversight responsibilities to partners, freeing up their teams for strategic tasks.
• Optimizing costs by leveraging the best use of a few strategic partners and the resulting economies of scale to optimize spending.
• Improved flexibility to accommodate additional requests (for example, quick ramp up and ramp down of operations, expansion to geographies of interest faster).
• Helping to define long-term digital strategies and provide more clarity on what the objectives and milestones should be.

Despite these benefits, lingering business concerns can delay engaging a BPS partner. For example, apprehension over impacting in-house teams – employee resistance, knowledge drain, and cultural discord – can be eased through rebadging. Rebadging involves transitioning in-house agents or employees to be managed by an external service provider. This shift allows companies to focus on their core competencies while outsourcing peripheral functions like customer support and HR services to experts who are at the forefront of technology and workforce optimization.

The Role of Rebadging in Transformation and Enhanced CX

Rebadging embodies empathy in business transitions by preventing employee displacement. Employees, regarded as the lifeforce of an organization, are retained as part of a new, mutually beneficial partnership. It’s also a strategic move that allows enterprises to pivot to a more service-oriented model while simultaneously enhancing customer experience through:

• A Focus on Core Business - By outsourcing peripheral functions, businesses can focus on their core operations, driving innovation and growth. 
• Expertise and Efficiency - Service providers bring specialized expertise and cutting-edge technology, ensuring efficient and high-quality service delivery.
• Flexibility and Scalability - Rebadging provides the flexibility to scale operations up or down based on business needs, ensuring optimal resource utilization.

For those on the frontline of transition, rebadging reframes the narrative by eliminating employee uncertainty. It ensures continuity while signaling openness to evolution and reinforcing a company’s commitment to its people and culture.

Empathetic partnerships like these can pave the way for an ecosystem where employee well-being remains a priority, irrespective of organizational allegiance. The resulting ripple effects will extend through company morale and, ultimately, customer satisfaction. Elevated by these virtues, the transition to the outsourcing model becomes not just a change of hands but a joining of hearts – a true partnership that resonates with authenticity and integrity.

Having successfully rebadged over 100,000 partner employees around the world through hundreds of rebadging projects over the past 12 years, our Teleperformance team knows how critical it is to choose a partner with the right capabilities, expertise, scale, and reach to successfully navigate the transition to an outsourced model. This is especially important when involving the transfer of employees and can even include the conversion of facility management or ownership. When done right, this shift allows organizations to focus on their core business by entrusting management of necessary, but peripheral, functions like customer support, HR services, and more to experts already at the leading edge of technology and workforce optimization.