Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: Hidden Risks in Call Center Outsourcing and Offshoring

What happens to your sensitive call center, data management or research project after give it to a BPO account manager?

The Manager and the Call Center Middle Man

Many project managers take a “don’t ask, don’t tell approach” to outsourcing. They understand that once they partner with a BPO firm, like a call center, that company in turn might subcontract tasks to other partners. The client just needs the call center project done, affordably and accurately.

In most cases, a BPO firm will disclose their list of subcontracting partners within their proposal or bid, or even in the final contract. In other scenarios, especially in the case of no-contract projects, the BPO firm may subcontract call center work wherever it feels will accomplish the clients’ project successfully, while maximizing the subcontractor’s share of the profit: middle men find the cheapest way to make more money from multiple layers of sub-subcontracting. Subcontractors can be stacked in a row to work on different parts of call center and other BPO projects without the clients’ prior knowledge. Additionally, especially in the case of call center management accounts, work may be farmed-out to workers anywhere in the world.

Why Call Center Offshoring Disclosure Matters

Offshoring call center projects to certain destinations potentially poses risks to any company outsourcing knowledge-based work, especially market research.  The United States and many other countries have established laws and regulations addressing intellectual property and creative rights, patent protections, trade secrets and other support systems protecting businesses from being burned by outright stealing from foreign competitors. Other popular call center offshoring destinations have not caught up with these efforts, and lag behind the US, Canada and Western Europe in addressing property rights and data theft. Additionally, enforcing these rights through many foreign court systems is difficult, if not nearly impossible in some areas of the world.

If your innovative project idea was hijacked by an aggressive foreign call center research worker with a few manufacturing resources to produce marketable copycats... what would you do

How Offshoring Disclosure Protects You and Your Rights

1-800 We Answer, Inc. is a United States-based call center support organization that keeps all the work we do within the United States, and does not engage in offshoring. We can accomplish your company’s call center projects contract-free, on a month to month basis without the need to outsource. We’ve entered into a self-disclosure agreement with The Foundation for Transparency in Offshoring, and have been certified as a BPO that does not engage in offshoring.

For our potential call center customers, this means that your intellectual property rights, your data and your company’s information are protected by United States business regulations. Practically speaking, we carefully monitor client and caller privacy, and have the technology in place to ensure data security for all of our call center accounts. We do our best to make sure your call data is secure. The technology, trade secrets and other data that you may entrust to us during the life of your call center project is protected.

Transparency and Trust

For your market research, data collection or any call center based project, you can rely on 1-800 We Answer to provide comprehensive tools and capable personnel to help you accomplish your goals. Knowing who is managing your projects, as well as knowing who is making your calls and where they are calling from, matters. Offshoring transparency means that you remain in complete control of your call center projects, even when you outsource.