On my earlier post on Social CRM Larry Irons asked a great question about how organizations can engage effectively with their customers and partners when much of their customer support is outsourced.

While there are no easy answers, there are two organizational capabilities that are increasingly critical for success. The first is developing clear strategies for what should be done inside the organization, and what should be done outside. These are difficult decisions to make, and even harder to implement well.

The second capability is aligning business processes with your external partners. In the following excerpt from Chapter 3 of Living Networks (available for download here), I describe the approaches call center giant Convergys takes to try to align culture and process with its clients.

At 6:53pm on November 9, 1989, an official of the East German government stated in a press conference that a new policy had been instituted to allow its citizens to travel to the West. Within minutes mobs formed outside the Berlin Wall. Before long the first bold few scrambled over the Wall unscathed, unlike the 61 people shot dead trying to escape during its grim 28-year history, while others grabbed hammers and anything else they could find to begin destruction of the hated barrier to freedom. An artificial, rigid, and guarded boundary dividing a country and millions of families had succumbed to the fluidity of the times. The same sense of rigidity and boundaries were also evident in the Eastern Germany economy. The East Berlin post office, before the fall, incorporated not just a restaurant and kindergarten for its employees, but also an auto repair shop and fishery. The difficulties in getting anything done meant that managers put boundaries around their organizations and tried to do everything possible inside them, resulting in immense duplication within the economy.

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