Maintaining An Effective Business Relationship

Following tips can assure you about good relationship with your offshore partner:

• Define a strong communication process
• Define the quality parameters and explain your expectations clearly
• Sign off the service level agreement.
• Define the payment process and terms and make sure you pay on time as per the terms.
• Review the relationship every month initially then quarterly.
• Avoid Lync communication for any argument or any long conversation; prefer phone or skype or any video conferencing device for any quick issue resolution.
• Try to be in constant touch with the outsourcing team to get the confidence (Regular teleconference, Video Conference and occasional visit to see outsourcing team can help you build trust with your partner).
• Avoid blaming culture and try to work as a team, if there is any mistake by you or outsourcing partner then resolve it by co-ordinating politely and take action to avoid this type of mistake in the future.
• Create a list of repetitive mistakes and share with your outsourcing partner to avoid it in future.

After having good experience and working explicitly in the outsourcing area, we have come up with the proven strategy which really works. IDS Logic has put in place an effective outsourcing model with world-class service and timely delivery to its global clientele. Our offshore customers, across a range of verticals, have benefited from increased productivity, sales, customer satisfaction and business value. IDS Logic has realised that relationship will not continue if both will not be in a win-win situation. To avoid this, IDS has taken the following steps

• Explaining our expectation to our partner’s system analyst to gather all information in a structured way.
• Discuss the requirement during presales
• Ensure the outsourcing scope in the proposal is going right to the end customer.
• Ensure mock pages and specifications are developed as per the proposal.
• Ensure error free development to save partner’s time
• Centralised Issue Tracker
• Screen sharing tool to explain the issue properly without any confusion.

Even putting efforts in various stages there could be instances, where it may not fulfil end customer’s expectations. Technically that should be treated as “change request”. However we understand that there would be cases where our partner would find very hard to charge the customer, in those cases we understand our partner’s expectation and don’t charge to our partner excluding exceptional cases.

• If partner will not analyse all requirement correctly from end customer ( so analysis needs to be right)
• If partner will not sign off mock pages and analysis from customer.
• Keeping the outsourcing team leader in loop wherever possible.