The Black Book of Outsourcing’s 2010 survey* results are published this month and they’ll make unhappy reading for the big name global players.
The 2010 survey, which drew on feedback from more than 6,500 outsourcing customers’ with experience of more than 30,000 services, identifies a demand and respect for niche specialist providers.
Eamonn Kennedy, research director at Datamonitor, led the research programme between April and August 2010. He said: “Whilst feedback on the big names, such as IBM and HP, has been generally positive, the companies that have excelled and delighted in the services they provide have been smaller players.”
One possible reason for this is that the nature of large scale outsourcing is more complex and therefore more predisposed to a lower level of average satisfaction.
“Smaller outsourcing providers have been pushing their specialist knowledge and deep client understanding as their unique selling point for some time now, claiming that specialists provide a better service. While all outsourcers talk up their ability to specialise, this survey suggests that smaller players are best positioned to deliver on that promise”, adds Eamonn
This is reinforced by the global top 50 list of outsourcers published by Black Book of Outsourcing. Six of the top 10 providers are either specialist legal process or financial research outsourcers. American Discovery, which comes top of the list of global outsourced service providers by company satisfaction ratings, is a provider of legal process outsourcing (LPO) providing corporations and law firms with increased quality controls and cost efficiencies.
Eamonn concludes: “The high score for customer satisfaction amongst knowledge based outsourcing providers can be attributed to the focused nature of their work and the fact that they arguably work for clients with the strictest professional requirements”
*The 2010 Black Book of Outsourcing study, focused on customer satisfaction in the global IT and business process outsourcing industry, has concluded after three months in the field.
