MyCustomer.com interviews ComXo, MultiVoice's parent company

You don't have to outsource abroad to put your brand at risk either. Andrew Try is managing director of ComXo, a Windsor-based outsource provider specialising in switchboard support. He admits his clients' concerns are understandable.

"Putting your brand into other people's hands is pretty risky," he says. "The difficulty one always has is that when you engage as a customer with another human being, they are the brand as far as you're concerned, despite the fact they might be an outsourced partner. Under whatever name they've answered the phone, that is who you are talking to, and if they don't represent that brand as you'd expect, it sours your experience of the brand. It can all come down to one individual at the end of the day, and if you have a bad experience you're not going to write to the company about it. They might never know."

That, in a nutshell, is probably the biggest problem with brand and outsourcing. It doesn't take much for brand damage to occur, and you will always find out about it too late. "Very small straws can break camels' backs," adds Try.

So what's the answer? An awful lot of upfront management time. Most outsource providers will be only too happy to provide you with a host of performance metrics to ensure the contact is being delivered smoothly, but they aren't always the right ones. Call centres, for example, will provide call volumes, answer times, the percentage of calls dropped, and so on. "But if you ask the person who called what their experience of that call was, you might find out something very different," Try says.

Brand protection requires more qualitative metrics, such as customer satisfaction studies. This process will be more involved, but it's essential if you want to keep things on track. All this will have to be drawn up from the start, of course. In fact, your brand's survival will be determined before the outsourcing has even begun.