Do you Offshore: Part Two

Last week I wrote about offshoring of backroom marketing research functions. In that post, I mentioned the frequency with which I am contacted regarding a request to send our business offshore.

Ironically, the number of requests I receive has increased substantially this week. Anyone who read my post last week would probably realize I am not a fan of offshoring. So why did the prospecting for my business increase? I am guessing it is driven by two things:

Bots have found my posting. Their users have incorrectly identified me as a good target for offshoring.
We noticed traffic to my blog from countries where much outsourcing happens has increased. So I suspect these people found my post, but again failed to pick up my negative tone toward offshoring.

It will be interesting to see what happens after this post.

Do you offshore?

For the past few months, I have been keeping track of the calls and emails I get from companies offering their offshore marketing research services to us. To my amazement, it has averaged 7 contacts per week. We are a moderate size research company. I can’t imagine how many times the larger firms are contacted. Most of the contacts are from India, but we also get the occasional contact from the Philippines or one of the Eastern European countries.

They use to primarily pitch the backroom operations of survey programming, data processing and tabulation, and occasionally phone interviewing. But these days they are also aggressively pitching statistical analysis, modeling, report writing and data analysis.

I can understand how offshoring of programming and data processing might make economic sense for the larger firms (who would keep a skeletal crew in the U.S. for these tasks). But for us, it just doesn’t make sense. We especially need data tabulation capabilities in-house. Without them, we would not be able to respond quickly to last minute “what ifs” from our analysts or clients. Sure, we could go back to the offshore company with special requests, but we would lose valuable time. In today’s pace, that’s time we can’t afford to lose.

I am, however, astounded to think companies are offshoring analysis and report writing. After all, the report is your final product. It is your depth of knowledge and insights that the client is paying for. Your local experiences with the product category and the culture also help craft your report. I just don’t understand how some stranger in India can produce an actionable report.

Am I missing the point? Are you having success with offshoring or have you faced disasters?

Hello 2009!

Like many people, I’m glad to say “good bye 2008, hello 2009”. Not too many business people have good things to say about 2008. The more favorable things I am hearing is “we survived”, “it could have been worse”, and “it’s behind us”.

“It could have been worse” probably sums up my feelings. It wasn’t a great year for the company, but it wasn’t a disaster either. And we learned from the experience. We found more efficient ways to do things, we realized we had more fat in our overhead than needed, and we reignited the team spirit. I would like to thank our employees, clients, vendors, family and friends who helped us get through such a challenging year. I truly had the opportunity to work with an inspiring group of people in 2008.

But on to 2009… Fortunately, our first quarter is looking very good. At least for now, it feels like the old times. I hope this is a sign of good things to come for us, the research industry, and the U.S. economy. Maybe we can all forget about 2008 real soon.