McIntosh collaborates with clients to identify the optimal sourcing strategy.

Our focus remains on call center operations and the enabling technologies that drive exceptional customer experiences. Over the past decade, we’ve witnessed dramatic transformations in the sourcing landscape—ranging from the expansion into additional off-shore markets to optimize labor costs to cloud-based technologies that extend far beyond basic network functionality, and the continued rise of business process outsourcing (BPO) for specialized call center functions. Today, AI, automation, and analytics are accelerating these shifts, enabling smarter, more scalable, and more responsive customer engagement.

McIntosh partners with clients to define their sourcing requirements and assess the organization’s internal capabilities against the potential value of external partnerships. Whether the goal is scaling operations, accessing specialized expertise, or leveraging AI-enabled platforms, our sourcing strategy begins with an internal assessment, navigates critical process decisions, and culminates in a plan that optimizes financial performance while minimizing operational and customer experience risk.

Our clients typically engage McIntosh for sourcing guidance in areas such as:

• Vendor supplied call center operations for live agent support
  • Agent resources staffed at vendor sites
  • Vendor managed home or hybrid agent resources
• Call center technologies evaluating functionality, delivery options, and AI-enhanced capabilities such as conversational analytics, agent assist tools, and automation platforms
• Temporary staffing to supplement client call center operations
• Vendor managed support processes including workload forecasting, network management, performance reporting, quality assurance, and self-service platform management (mobile, web, or automated voice channels)

Today’s outsourced processes leverage AI, machine learning, and advanced analytics to enable predictive routing, automated interactions, performance optimization, and actionable customer insights.  By combining deep experience in operations, BPO, and technology evaluation with exposure to diverse client environments, McIntosh helps organizations identify what works, avoid common pitfalls, and implement sourcing strategies that are not only cost-effective but also future-ready.

McIntosh’s experience and expertise in RFP design and management guides clients through the requirements definition phase, identifying service level targets, and mitigating customer experience and financial risk through early introduction of contractual terms and conditions.

McIntosh has extensive experience evaluating domestic as well as near-shore and off-shore outsourcing firms having conducted site audits at major providers’ global locations. Whether you seek data to support a request for information (RFI), seek to gauge market pricing through a request for quote (RFQ), or are prepared to solicit a robust solution as defined by precise requirements in a request for proposal (RFP), McIntosh has the expertise and the experience to guide you through the process.

McIntosh’s approach leverages a requirements definition framework and an RFI/RFP template, which is then customized to the client’s requirements. Through these tools we identify and document the client’s critical business requirements and key performance expectations.

Risk mitigation is a major consideration in managing an RFI/RFP process.  McIntosh includes critical operational performance standards and contractual terms and conditions as critical compliance areas during the solicitation process.  Firms seeking to respond to the solicitation must accept the standards and terms as specified in the RFI/RFP or their responses will not be accepted. It is our experience that a sales organization can more easily secure agreement to these requirements prior to contract award; we leverage the sales process to ensure compliance with requirements rather than diluting the strength of these requirements by subjecting them to contract negotiations.

Contact McIntosh for more details about our requirements definition and solicitation frameworks and to obtain a preliminary assessment of the time and effort required to support your efforts.

McIntosh provides a variety of implementation services to support clients’ implementation requirements.

Clients frequently leverage McIntosh’s experienced project and implementation managers to supplement or manage their existing staff. Especially when faced with an aggressive timeline and limited resources, McIntosh provides clients with expert resources with implementation experience.

At a minimum, we provide the following implementation and project management services:

• Project planning and project management across multiple providers including internal and contract resources. Our largest project deployed over a dozen call center operations, over 3,000 agents, and leveraged twelve locations and six vendors. For a major CRM deployment, we managed two outside systems integrators, IT internal resources, and business unit resources to project completion.
• Staff augmentation particularly when an implementation results in significant organizational restructuring and the client requires additional time to recruit, train, and deploy new resources. McIntosh site managers have worked for up to one year augmenting client staff requirements post implementation.  We have provided quality assurance support during and post implementation and have managed centralized intra-day command centers recruiting and training replacement staff.
• Staff training from curriculum development for front-line agent personnel to management effectiveness training.  We design processes and train internal resources for call center support functions (e.g., WFM, quality monitoring, and customer survey management). We have worked with a major airline carrier in the past to staff almost twenty professional trainers in the Philippines and India when a client organization had insufficient training resources to support the large scale implementation.

We are accustomed to managing blended teams of client, vendor, and integration team participants and have successfully executed on the challenges of implementing new call center operations, new or enhanced technologies, and innovative staffing models.