The Challenge
The client ran a call centre owned by Operations to remotely manage physical access to 20,000+ sites across France. Three channels were running in parallel, each with its own way of working:
- An internal team, aligned with ops requirements but expensive and tying up senior staff on transactional work that did not warrant their level.
- A premium external provider: good service, but a cost structure that did not scale across the full perimeter.
- A low-cost external provider: cheap, but service quality consistently below the bar, with no underlying process to lift it.
Leadership wanted two things that usually contradict each other: drive cost down significantly AND lift service quality on an activity where any failure literally cuts off physical access to sites.
My brief: move the call centre to a professional offshore structure that delivers the savings, frees senior internal time for higher-value operational work, and ships a more digitalised, higher-quality process underneath.
What I Found
The cost gap was real. The quality gap was a process gap. Where the low-cost provider fell short was not geography, it was the absence of operating model, scripts, SLA tracking and digital instrumentation. With the right partner and the right setup, savings AND quality were on the table at the same time, not as a trade-off.
The francophone BPO market could be scoped tightly: scan of four geographies (Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the Maghreb, Africa), reverse cost decomposition confirming Madagascar held on cost AND on a credible francophone talent base.
Round 1 was an open RFP, with provider proposals, price confirmation and innovation ideas on process and digital tooling. Round 2 was a reverse auction on MarketDojo, with 4 Madagascar-based BPOs competing on a locked technical scope.
The Approach
Move to a professional offshore structure. Stop arbitrating between cheap, good and internal. Pick one partner with the operating model, scripts, SLA tracking and digital instrumentation to take the call centre end to end. Internal capacity freed for the work that actually warranted it.
Redesign and digitalise the process. Tickets routed through a single workflow, decision trees on the critical access procedures, real-time dashboards for ops to see quality, volumes and SLA compliance. The new process was instrumented from day one, not retrofitted later. The result was a service that ran with more data, fewer manual handoffs and far less escalation noise than the previous mix.
Reverse auction with locked scope. 4 Madagascar-based BPOs competed on a tightly-defined technical scope (volumes, SLAs, compliance requirements, digital tooling). Clear scope is the success condition: a reverse auction fails the moment scope drifts. Here, every provider was pricing exactly the same thing.
Tough SLA enforcement. Monthly KPIs contractually locked with strong penalties on drift. Quarterly business review with the ops line, not only with procurement. The operational owner had to see quality tracking in real time.
90-day parallel-run. Internal team, historical premium provider and new Madagascar operator running in parallel for 90 days before cutover. Temporary additional cost absorbed as non-negotiable quality insurance. Zero service disruption during the transition.
Internal transition. The senior internal staff who had been tied up on transactional work were redeployed to higher-value operational tasks (complex incident management, tier-2 field support, continuous improvement). Active change management on both HR and line-manager sides. This is usually the workstream that makes or breaks this kind of project.