Outsourcing: how to successfully transfer knowledge with your provider

Today, companies have to juggle several factors to face competition, to position themselves optimally and effectively in a market that leaves no room for doubt or lack of information. So much so, that knowledge is an obvious, inescapable and essential component. As part of your outsourcing project, you will need to focus on acquiring, retaining, transferring and applying knowledge to your provider. It all starts with internal teamwork.

It must be noted that the creation of knowledge in-house is a process that involves risks, expenses, and complexity associated with new technologies. In order to achieve concrete and sustainable results that can evolve equanimously, it is essential for your company to involve your partners, including your outsourcing provider. This is what will be called interagency learning.

The importance of knowledge sharing for the development of your business

By engaging in knowledge sharing with your outsourcing provider, your company will achieve several major goals:

• Becoming more effective: knowledge is clearly recorded and easily accessible to those who need it at the right time. Business processes are becoming faster, reducing the possibility of mistakes occurring.
• Maintain a high level of knowledge: this becomes possible, even when key people in your company resign.
• Maintain an optimal level of knowledge: through exercises, tests, situation tests and continuous training of your employees, you will allow the provider to access these updates to avoid any misunderstanding or error.

How to share your company’s knowledge with your provider?

A company that willingly shares its knowledge with its provider, whether through training manuals, guides or even FAQs, had to do an important job. This work enabled it to highlight errors that it corrected in order to grow and to face the competition. The cascading effect has allowed the company to continually improve its level of service delivery.

Learning to share knowledge is a thoughtful process, which requires a certain amount of time in order not to be surprised by the factors that might prevent the company from moving in that direction. By engaging your company in such an approach, it will lead to a change in culture and funding that is equal to the mission. The goal is to create an environment conducive to the creation of knowledge, so that it can be shared effectively, easily and quickly.

In practice, knowledge sharing can now take place through new technologies. There are many easy-to-use and affordable tools that can support the sustainability of working with your provider. The important thing is to know how to adapt the sharing system to your employees and to those of your service provider. These may be:

• Webinars,
• An intranet or extranet,
• A blog,
• Social networks,
• Learning management systems (LMS),
• A knowledge base or a
• A Wiki.

Why use your outsourcing provider?

Outsourcing is not just the simple delegation of one service from one company to another, however specialised it may be. In reality, it is a collaboration, a partnership, an opportunity for exchange and, above all, the propagation of knowledge between two business partners. It is not just a matter of exchanging information that is easily transmitted, but of sharing real know-how, for example, in the areas of human resources, satisfaction surveys, remote secretarial services, tele-shopping or telemarketing.

List of benefits

The exchange of knowledge with your provider requires a fairly large amount of upstream work. However, the impact is not to be taken lightly:

• For you: improvement of your performance towards your customers; improvement of your services; optimised prices; deadlines met; increase of your provider’s competence which favours your existing customers and prospective ones.
• For your service provider : improvement of its Know-How; increase in the volume of customers.

Increasing the chances of successful knowledge transfer

If knowledge transfer is an exercise in itself, it carries risks that can be overcome. The secret lies in the commitment and trust that will come to support the customer-provider relationship. As such, these two elements must be granted sparingly.

All this to say that the choice of provider will be the key to your outsourcing project. You will share a local and close collaboration, on the condition that the company is located, for example, in Mauritius. For this, your outsourcing process will provide a team entirely dedicated to monitoring the smooth running of the collaboration, meetings in person which will be sufficiently developed for a long-term relationship.

As your service provider undoubtedly offers its services to other customers, it is essential to pave the way for a strong, tangible, transparent and respectful collaboration, especially with regard to your critical data and information, such as your production costs.

Here again, Knowledge Transfer can play a major role!

In conclusion

Knowledge sharing must be seen as an added value. So during your outsourcing process, you will need to ensure that your organisation clearly understands the ins and outs of your project. The people at the top of the hierarchy must be sufficiently convinced of the benefit of such an initiative to, then, be able to convince your employees so that they too can understand the importance of your sharing approach.

In the long term, this will allow to feed the support that will offer your provider information composed of unique elements of quality, relevance and without any redundancy.