Odesk is blowing my mind a little bit. To me, the big idea is that it provides a framework for a small business to access the potential savings involved in outsourcing work overseas. My experience (from a distance) with outsourcing is that quite a bit of investment is necessary before any coding is delivered.
- Committing to a staffing model for your overseas team is non-trivial. My company was looking at either going through a contractor (2/3 of what you pay goes to the contractor, so you get cheaper folks) while the other option of incorporating locally is probably majorly expensive too.
- Once you know the team, there's still quite a bit of preparation and almost always some travel to the country in question if not shipping someone overseas to stay for a couple of years.
I can see the potential for a lot of different jobs that a smaller company might want done and odesk has the providers to do them. The really crazy thing (to me anyway) is how no job seems too small. For instance, people are looking to hire a virtual assistant to build their online brand (basically work their facebook and linkedin accounts). I saw one job advertized from a person who wanted somebody to do job research (find all sales jobs in my area, then fill out a spreadsheet with the job and (with the help of linkedin, facebook, whatever) the contact info of the hiring manager, the VP of Sales, and the VP of HR. The whole virtual assistant idea to me is fascinating. Clearly, there's a market there and people willing to meet the needs of that market.
While I'm not convinced (yet, anyway) that outsourcing enterprise software support to an overseas team, especially for the complex product I currently support, will ever be as effective as having an experienced domestic team, I can see some potential in odesk for some of what we do. Some tasks aren't in the core competency of a Customer Support Engineer, but are critical to success all the same.
One thing that springs to mind is KB content creation. For any Enterprise Software Support organization, you'll have a big bunch of closed cases that can be mined for possible knowledgebase articles. It's not particularly challenging work, but it usually doesn't get done because the CSEs are too interrupt-driven to spend time writing out content. As a result, CSEs spend time typing up the same set of instructions or working tickets that could have been resolved by self-service. How cool would it be to be able to hire someone for $10/hour to rifle through the support history (you could give them a CSE login) and knock out a whole bunch of KB articles? Our customer portal software has a little bit of workflow with it too, so we could have the provider submit a bunch of drafts to be reviewed by a CSE prior to being published. Its potentially a cheaper way towards a prolific knowledge base. Since rating content is something that customers can do in our support portal software, one could even incent the content creators with extra bucks for positively reviewed (by the customer) articles.
An industry rule of thumb for most software is that you can address up to 40% of the issues that customers are going to see with effective KB content. My company's main product isn't even as great a fit for knowledgebase articles as say, a cloud service, in that many issues might be too specific to be apply to another customer. However, we're starting to see a lot of growth in self service or at least usage of self service content since building out the knowledge base. That translates to savings. Makes me wonder what additional savings me might attain with a team of knowledgebase authors constantly adding fresh content.
Do you have experience using odesk or with outsourcing in the support world you'd like to share? Feel free to have your virtual assistant log in and comment on your behalf.
I have no experience with odesk, but it does look interesting.
ReplyDeleteAt my previous company we used to "outsource" KB article creation to one of our tech writers. This worked great! The CSE would close a case and then, if applicable, kick off a "process" that said this case should be made into a KB article. The CSE could either take a stab at simplifying the content, or just submit the whole case as is and let the tech writer wade thought the mess and pick out the pearls. Of course the ones where some attempt was made to clean up first were posted faster. I'm sure plenty of the support tickets that were submitted in whole were never publicly posted.
I'm skeptical of "outsourcing" this kind of thing too far away because I believe that the editing/approval stage would take longer to insure a high quality result than just investing the time locally. Our very talented tech writer would often come by with a printout of the initial draft and a red pen and it would leave the office looking like one of my 7th grade English papers. Highly technical content just can't be consumed by someone not familiar with the specific technology. Of course that and my current enterprise support gig involve technology and software that is very complex.
Now, with this in mind, I think this type of thing can be done (even locally) for a low cost. I'm a big fan of hiring college students for co-op or intern positions. I also think it's possible to do with a talented temporary recourse. This would be even easier with the right business processes in place. In any situation I think the key is finding the right person. That's a blog post all of it's own...