How tkg successfully realigned the partnership between a buyer and their BPO supplier

The brief.

We were approached by a large retail brand to support with improving their partnership with one of their existing BPO suppliers. The relationship had become strained through a combination of significant operational challenges, including changes in management positions within both organisations and the commercial structure incentivisation for the supplier not being aligned to the overall customer experience strategy of the buyer.

Some of the challenges included:

• The commercial assurance and governance model with the supplier was causing friction and restricting the client’s ability to deliver their customer experience transformation.
• There was a disconnect between the commercial incentivisation for the supplier and the client’s service expectations.
• Basic operational practices and delivery metrics were not being adhered to and the client was looking to take greater control.
• The supplier was leveraging the contract to their advantage, and therefore appeared to not be working in partnership.

Our services.

Within the programme, we were retained to perform a supplier health check assessment to help our client understand whether the partnership was repairable and if the supplier had the capability to work with the client on their digital transformation journey. This included:

• Analysing the overarching business strategy, and within this any desired customer experience outcomes.
• Performing an invoice audit to validate the fees from the supplier with the contract.
• Assessing the contract with its commercial terms and benchmarking this with industry best practice.
• Understanding the complexity of the service delivery from the supplier.
• Reviewing the contract and the associated governance in place.
• Reviewing processes, procedures, models, data and governance surrounding the sizing of the operation and approval of staffing.
• Analysing the outputs that were delivered by the supplier to the client, the basis of the data and the reliance on their infrastructure to support this.
• Reviewing the RACI between the client’s retained team, wider business and the supplier.

From this, we were able to:

• Provide our recommendations outlining how to improve the partnership with the supplier, including rebuilding the commercial structure in the contract and rebalancing the risk between the client and their supplier.
• Build a change programme for the client and lead the workstreams to reinstate the current contractual position, implement a new governance model and build a new commercial partnership.

“Working with tkg was easy, enjoyable, and delivered on expectation in both value and return on investment. The team listened and understood our objectives and tailored the support by providing industry professionals with the skills and expertise to deliver our requirements.”

Our client was impressed with our agile and hands-on approach. We successfully obtained a significant rebate from the supplier linked to our invoice audit. Plus, the new commercial structure and governance meant that the reduction in the charges moving forward were significantly less compared to before our intervention, contributing to an increase in service quality by focusing the supplier on the metrics that made a difference.

We were retained as an advisor to the client’s management team and continue to support them across numerous projects.