A couple of weeks ago, I promised to write about offshore outsourcing successes and failures. To that end, this week's column describes the successes that CompuCredit has enjoyed in outsourcing business processes to a service provider in India.

CompuCredit is a marketing and servicing company providing consumers with a variety of financial services including branded credit cards, debit cards and fee-based products and services. I spoke with CompuCredit CTO Mark Lawrence, a few weeks ago as we discussed his company's business process outsourcing (BPO) success story.

According to Lawrence, CompuCredit's primary BPO drivers included cost-reduction, the ability to focus on core competencies, improved service levels, and shortened times to market for new products.

Potential inhibitors included a perceived loss of control, concerns about service dependability and security, and the cost of the solution. CompuCredit also needed to maintain control and security over applications and data while reducing implementation time, offshore bandwidth requirements, and the overall costs and risks of using an offshore service provider. The company also needed to remain in compliance with regulations - a key BPO concern for many.

CompuCredit's offshore BPO initiative began in 2001 when it underwent a large cost-cutting transformation in order to conserve cash to weather the recession. In support of this, in 2002 the company cut a large percentage of its IT staff and decided to move its customer service contact centers, which were already outsourced to an onshore service provider, to an offshore model - quickly. India was the primary target for the offshore initiative, with Panama as a secondary (for Spanish language operations). The goal was to outsource all "level 1" inbound customer service calls while keeping escalations and collections calls in-house.

The company's IT organization had to ensure that this transition happened smoothly, delivering a mixture of custom and standard applications to the outsourcer while maintaining security. Since the company was already a Citrix customer, it chose the MetaFrame Access Suite as the delivery mechanism (note that the company kept its entire IT infrastructure in its Atlanta data center, choosing to outsource only the call center). By delivering only an encrypted presentation layer to the outsourcer, CompuCredit maintained security while requiring the service provider to offer only basic desktop PCs - the service provider was not required to install any software other than the Citrix ICA client.