Client Outsource is now focused entirely on providing customer satisfaction measurement services.

by Jeff Goldman [February 11, 2009]

Client Outsource was founded back in 2002 by Christopher Ewen and Vinoo Mehera. The company initially offered a wide range of customer transaction management services, including customer service, technical support and sales—but over the past few years, Client Outsource has shifted its focus almost entirely to providing customer satisfaction measurement services.

Ewen says that for many clients, that can be an extremely attractive offering. "A company will hire us to call their customers, or contact their customers via e-mail, or conduct a survey over the web while they're on a website, to determine what their experience has been, and then they use that data in turn to incentivize their customer-facing staff to achieve a much better customer experience," he says.

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Looking back, Ewen says the company's shift in focus actually happened by accident. "One of our clients asked us to help them out with a project, and we did really well with it," he says. "We had some internal resources that were very good at customer satisfaction measurement and doing online reporting on that, so we decided that was a business we should be in. We found that it was more suited to us."

While the majority of the company's services used to be based in India, Ewen says that has also changed. "If it's an e-mail survey, then it doesn't have a large labor component in any case, so we use servers that are based in the U.S., and it's all Microsoft-based collection methods and data reporting methods," he says. "And we have the capability to do voice surveys both from India and from the U.S."

Making the most of the data
The point, Ewen says, is that it's less about the data gathering itself than it is about what you do with the results. "Where we have the sweet spot is helping our clients with what they need to measure, how to measure it, and how they can communicate that data to their organization so that they can move the needle in terms of customer satisfaction and therefore customer loyalty," he says.

Ease of use for the client, Ewen says, is key: different employees can have different levels of access to the online system, and each user can drill down to view specific portions of data as needed. "If they want to look just at California is performing, or just at how a certain team is performing, they can do that," he says.

In all cases, the service is heavily customized to meet each client's needs. "We have a whole bank of questions that we've asked over the years, but it's a tailored approach, a continuous relationship where we work with the client to hone and hone that survey instrument until it's performing for their particular business really well," Ewen says.

Pricing, Ewen says, is per survey. "We talk to the clients about what level of confidence they want to have in the data and how they want to use the data, and then we come back to them and give them a recommended level of surveys per geography, per product line, per organizational group, per functional part of the organization—and they can take that and say okay, or they can downgrade or upgrade it," he says.

Increasing performance
Ewen says Client Outsource generally works with companies that have a minimum of 4,000 customer interactions per month. "We're able to work pretty well in our current model with those types of customers," he says. "We'd like to be in a position where we can work with companies that have a lower volume than that, but I think to make it economically efficient for them, we would need to have something that was a little bit less customized and more out-of-the-box."

The vast majority of organizations that contract with Client Outsource, Ewen says, eventually make use of the resulting data to determine staff pay. "Usually after about 12 months, customers see the data coming in for a while, and they decide the data is stable enough and reliable enough that they can use that data for incentivizing frontline customer-facing staff," he says.

And Ewen says the results speak for themselves. "We've found that in every case, our clients are able to increase their performance in the eyes of the customer, and that has real effects in terms of retention and growth rate and so forth," he says. "And they can actually see it—they can identify where the issues are, and they can really start to take actions based on that data. So I feel really great about it, because I know that we're having an effect on the type of service that our clients' customers get."

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