Outsourcing customer facing applications

There's a great new outsourcing article up at CW today.  The article, "The Seven Deadly Sins of Outsourcing," held a lot of interest for me because I've often thought there were numerous deadly sins for outsourcing and I was curious how the author, Judy Artunian, handled these sins.

Artunian's article is excellent, but there was one specific topic I agreed with more than any of the others--Blindly banishing project.  The sin is outsourcing customer facing technologies, and I was one of those people that threw a screaming fit when Dell sent its technical support to an offshore outsourcer.  I'm all for outsourcing, but there are some things that just shouldn't be outsourced.  Customer facing technologies fall into that category. 

The benefit of outsourcing is that the company that chooses to outsource can then focus on its core business.  The problem with outsourcing customer facing applications and technologies is that customers are a company's core business.  No matter what product or service is at the heart of your business, the truth of the matter remains that without customers, products and services don't matter.

So why shouldn't you outsource customer facing applications and technologies?  Look at it this way: Would you outsource your core business?  Probably not because outsourcing your core business puts too much responsibility on someone else's shoulders.  Outsourcing your customer applications has the same result. 

Outsourcing is an excellent strategy for improving the way you do business, but there's a point where outsourcing is no longer valuable.  That point is where customer care of any kind begins.  Your organization is built around providing a service or product to a selected group of customers.  You've researched your customers.  You've studied your customers.  You know your customers better than anyone else possibly could.  So, why would you depend on anyone else to provide the care and feeding of your customers?