Insights
Offshoring in a highly regulated industry?
By
Daniel Coonan
Build an integrated transformation team and communicate with clients proactively to address their concerns and highlight the benefits of offshoring.
In Brief
Companies are increasingly offshoring client services and must reach out to clients to secure their approval, which poses special challenges in highly regulated industries
Taking a cross-disciplinary approach to crafting client communications solves these challenges because it addresses the wide range of client concerns and needs with an offshore service model
Leading companies in highly regulated industries like healthcare and life sciences are expanding their use of offshore resources to provide client services and reap multiple benefits. Companies pursuing offshoring face the question of how to inform clients and, in some cases, request a change to contractual restrictions that limit or prohibit offshoring. Clients will have concerns about data and physical security, compliance, quality of services, and sharing in cost savings if permission to offshore is granted.
Addressing these client concerns and obtaining permission to offshore services is no small feat and requires a cross-disciplinary team composed of marketing, sales, legal, technology, and operations leaders.
Marketing – At its core, the effort to communicate with clients to convince them of the benefits of offshoring is a marketing campaign.
Sales – Sales often owns the relationships with clients, and they will be instrumental in the communication of issues as clients will want to work with their relationship owners.
Legal – Legal has a critical role in contract term negotiations and convincing clients that they have the contractual protections required to agree to offshoring.
Technology – Data security will be paramount to clients and Technology will provide the evidence that physical and information security infrastructure, policies, and procedures meet or exceed contractual and legal requirements.
Operations – Planning and executing the outreach to clients at scale requires operational specialization and leadership.
An integrated transformation team can speak to a myriad of client concerns about offshoring, like data and physical security, compliance, quality of services, and sharing in cost savings. This will ensure clients receive a customized and comprehensive communication that addresses their needs and concerns effectively. Active engagement where needed by individual leaders representing marketing, sales, legal, technology, and operations will ensure clients receive timely answers. By utilizing a cross-disciplinary team, clients are more likely to agree to offshoring faster than efforts led in a siloed fashion, so that both company and clients quickly realize the benefits of offshoring client services.