McIntosh collaborates with clients to identify the optimal sourcing strategy including internally sourced, outsourced, or hosted solutions.

Our focus is call center operations and the enabling technologies supporting customer experience management.  We have witnessed dramatic transformations in the sourcing environment—the addition of off-shore operations delivering labor arbitrage, the expansion of cloud based/hosted technologies beyond network functionality, and the emergence of business process outsourcing for call center support functions.

McIntosh works with clients to define their sourcing requirements and then realistically assess the organization’s internal sourcing capabilities versus the value of looking externally for scale, expertise, or a partner to support growth.  Sourcing strategy begins with an internal assessment, requires decisions at critical process junctures, and results in a plan that delivers optimal financial value while mitigating customer experience and operational risk.

In general, McIntosh’s clients seek sourcing support when considering a sourcing strategy involving one or more of the following:

• Vendor supplied call center operations for live agent support
  • Agent resources staffed and managed within a vendor brick and mortar site
  • Vendor managed home or remote agent resources
• Call center technologies with strategy assessing functionality as well as delivery options (premise based vs hosted solutions )
• Temporary staffing to supplement client call center operations
• Vendor managed call center support processes.  It is important to note there is a difference between a hosted platform, the delivery of functionality that the client manages and the vendor managing a process that may reside on a hosted or premise based platform. Outsourced processes may include workload forecasting, network management, daily performance and traffic reporting, quality assurance (call/interaction observations across client and vendor sites), and management/support of self-service platforms including mobile, web, and automated voice platforms.

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.