The Vendor Overhaul That Saved $1M
Sylvan Road Capital | VP, Resident Experience & Shared Services
The contact center and BPO operation was producing daily resident complaints. Emails went unanswered a d portal chats were ignored or buried. Escalations to the vendor's leadership team produced acknowledgment and no correction and nobody had quantified what the problem was costing.
The assumption built into the vendor contract was that the headcount in place was the headcount required to handle the work volume. That assumption had never been tested. There was no time study data, no comparative benchmark and no structured CSAT measurement. Sylvan Road was renewing a contract on faith while the performance data said the relationship was broken.
The Situation
The first move was to stop debating the quality problem and start quantifying it. Time studies were conducted on every task type the BPO team was handling. Stateside employees completed identical tasks under the same conditions. The finding was direct: the vendor was taking up to twice as long to complete tasks. Across the full workload, that inefficiency translated directly into inflated headcount. Sylvan Road was paying for people to work at half the efficiency a competent team would deliver.
The service quality data was pulled in parallel and compiled into an ROI statement for C-suite presentation. The document showed what the current vendor was costing, what a competent replacement would cost at the headcount the work required and what the service performance gap looked like in measurable terms. The recommendation was not to renegotiate, it was to replace.
As part of the transition, a CSAT measurement system was designed and implemented for the first time, giving the company real performance data instead of complaint volume as a proxy for service quality.
The Action
The provider change saved Sylvan Road $1 million annually. Headcount was reduced from 67 to 27 FTEs because the new provider operated at the efficiency level the work required. Service performance shifted across every channel simultaneously.