Outsourced marketing for efficiency and better performance
More efficiency, leaner staffing, better performance
The brief
Most businesses regularly review organisation structure to develop and adapt, to improve performance and to find efficiencies. Over time this leads to reducing staff numbers in some parts of the business alongside growth in staffing in other areas. For Hertz car rental in Europe, the business challenge was to find opportunities to improve performance and efficiency whilst becoming leaner in staffing overall.
Strategy
In planning changes to how we managed marketing, we recommended the use of outsourcing as an opportunity to move lower level general marketing and administrative tasks to suppliers, whilst keeping higher level planning and strategy for payrolled staff.
Actions
Our approach started by listing the scope of work for centralised Customer Relationship Marketing (‘CRM’) into task areas one by one, then subjectively ‘pricing’ an hour spent on each task area to give it a hypothetical value. We then ranked the list by value to highlight the lower level task areas as opportunities for outsourcing.
The next step included specifying the targeted areas in more detail, describing the work involved together with proposed Service Levels and Key Performance Indicators. In time this was to become the basis for a supplier outsourcing contract – the specification became a scope of work document, which formed part of an invitation to tender through which we awarded the outsourcing contract together with appraising costs and agreeing a transition plan.
Principles in managing the new outsourced resource included treating the outsourced staff as part of a wider virtual team, with desk space alongside payrolled staff and authority to make decisions relating to the agreed scope of work. Clear and specific targets and measurement worked well with a high degree of empowerment of outsourced staffing to make decisions to improve performance over time.
The big difference
A year after the completion of the outsourcing we’d taken five staff off payroll, and improved performance across outsourced task areas by up to +60%.
Click here to read more about reviewing the efficiency of your marketing activity.
