Of superstores and super size
posted by Glen Stidolph in Outsourcing |
Once again Mark Kobayashi-Hillary of the Talking Outsourcing blog (http://markkobayashihillary.computing.co.uk) came up with a little gem of info.
During a meeting over coffee in London with a friend, who just happens to be a consultant who often works on supplier comparison, helping companies to look at the strengths and weaknesses of different suppliers, and hopefully helping them to pick the right one for their project.
His coffee companion told him that he recently had a client with a fairly small project. Probably about £50,000 a year of work (approx $100,000) to a supplier, comparatively small in comparison to some of the recently announced mega ICT outsource projects, but the client was interesting and so the potential was clearly there for the relationship to grow bigger. It was a helpdesk project that could expand into support for several languages. He went on to say that he had called one of the top 10 Indian suppliers to ask if they would be interested in the project. His call was not returned. He tried calling again. He got nothing but voicemail. After three days of getting voicemail he gave up on them, thinking that if that’s the way they organise their own customer service then how are they going to organise it better for the client?
It’s not even as if they were just avoiding him because the project was too small to deal with. He was calling the switchboard of their local London office and getting this reaction. Even if the project was too small to be of interest, the very least someone could have done is given him a call to let him know.
I would have thought that someone in his position may have tried to match a small (..ish) project like that to a smaller ICT service provider rather go straight to the larger companies, or is everyone now used to superstores, supermarkets, super-size?…..or does one of the largest Indian ICT companies, Tata, know something that he didn’t…..as they have just announced a division specifically targeting SME’s
Sounds like good business sense to me considering the above and the fact that many SME’s need a particular kind of service to assist them in what is freqently a traumatic and enterprise changing decision for SME’s to outsource any of their processes.
