There are 3 core problems that prevent the outsourcing industry from providing high-quality services for healthcare companies.
1. Saturated Markets, Commoditized Jobs
What makes a valuable job? A good boss? Good wages? A career path?
The overlooked value driver is simply rarity. The traditional outsourcing model has flooded global hubs with look-alike jobs. Outsourcers hire people with outsourcing backgrounds who recreate their successful work over and over again. This results in commoditized work where the primary decision making criteria is wage.
Connecting roles to places and people where the opportunity is more rare is an art and a science. One way to do it is by operating in locations that other employers overlook, but this means overcoming the obstacles that have kept others away. The other is to design a unique role and develop into it. How can you develop your team into an advanced skillset, pass along more financial value to them, and remove the incentive to leave for the same job with a different logo in the upper left corner of Slack?
Which brings us to the next point:
2. Too little development
I, like a lot of people in this industry, started on the phones. There were two ways to progress:
- Move "up" the ladder and manage a group of front-line staff
- Develop new skill and transition out of support and into another business function
Investment in development in an outsourcing business is overwhelmingly devoted to the former, imparting team members with the skills required to manage greater numbers of direct and indirect reports. Talent acquisition is charged with replenishing promoted and attrited front-line staff as well as recruiting already-developed managers from competitors.
CSRs become Team Leads. Recruiters become Recruiting Managers.
This model is fundamentally designed to support growing headcount. No growth in headcount means no opportunity for advancement. Far less common is the development of skills into more productive and more interesting non-management work.
Which brings us to the final point:
3. Wrong incentives
AI and automation have created a sizable opportunity for outsourcing.
Companies today aren't reducing cost, they're reducing waste. Waste is cost that doesn't contribute to ROI (return on investment).
Front-line staff feel the pain of waste immediately. Inefficient, manual workflows have them repeating arduous, high volume tasks. Dissatisfied customers don't pull punches about letting customer service reps know their frustrations. Yet, training outsourced team members to solve the root cause of problems doesn't benefit them or their employers.
As they say, the reward for good work is more work but, in this case, the reward for good work is less revenue and fewer jobs.
The result is a relationship where outsourcers seek to deliver as many hours of work as possible while their clients seek to reduce the number of hours of work needed. How can those incentives be aligned?
The AI and Automation Opportunity
It's called Human in the Loop, but what it is really is human oversight of automation. This is as true today as it was in Taiichi Ohno wrote about Toyota's manufacturing operations in 1978.
Automation of correct work is extremely valuable.
Automation of incorrect work is extremely wasteful.
The teams we have "on the front lines" have been measured for a long time on how much correct work they do. The big opportunity in outsourcing and in operations is to re-align incentives for the AI era.
Humans have intuition and experience. AI has efficiency and deep analytics. The opportunity is to reimagine the "front line" role in an outsourcing company as one that manages many concurrent processes, monitoring the outputs for correct work and intervening to fix problems as they happen. Their insights complement those from management to improve automated processes over time, reducing errors and increasing automation rates, freeing up valuable time to focus on work that generates more ROI.
The amount of work doesn't grow exponentially in volume like in the past, it changes. Some of the work becomes automation oversight, monitoring the health of automated workflows and intervening manually to fix problems. Some of it becomes high-touch work, focusing on solving problems completely without the pressure of a high-volume queue to get back to.
Both of these (and more) require clients to invest commercial structures that look different than fully-bundled rates for front-line work. They require outsourcers to become experts at developing roles that are unique to a type of workflow or business.
Simply put, automation oversight or AI management becomes a billable service at a higher margin than just labor.
The result is more work being done correctly at a lower total cost with each item in the value chain creating and capturing more value.
Why Healthcare?
Healthcare work is different. It's complex, regulated, high stakes, and stressful. It sees patients in crisis, literal life-and-death decisions, high financial stakes for all parties, and is a critical product/service for users.
Healthcare companies deliver better services when they can be efficient, directing resources to the things that actual deliver patient outcomes. Many processes are inefficient and manual, making them perfect for automation while their critical nature requires minimizing errors.
It's the perfect sector to fix the problems in outsourcing a create a business that's better for employees and clients.