InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
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October 23, 2000 |
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Call Centers: Here, There, And Everywhere
Many companies shift from centralized centers to multiple outsourced global locations
By Norbert Turek
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hen Logitech Europe SA hired Robert Laudensack to bolster its call-center strategy, he routinely spent 100% of his time troubleshooting. With multiple vendors and carriers involved in the customer-service center, there were plenty of problems to solve. After struggling with circuit outages and equipment breakdowns, he decided to outsource part of the global call center to a single provider. The result? "The outsourcing led to me being virtually jobless," he says. "Customer service [systems management] is about 5% of my time now."Logitech Europe, whose parent company is the world's largest manufacturer of mouse-pointing devices, kept Laudensack and rewarded him with a broadened role: European project manager for sales and marketing information systems. But his situation illustrates the value that can ensue when companies outsource even some of their call-center operations. Not only is troubleshooting virtually eliminated, but so are employee retention issues and a good chunk of the cost of running call centers in-house. Also, call-center operations are streamlined, and multilingual support is easier to offer. The downside, however, is that companies lose control over some relationships with their customers.
Nonetheless, many companies are shifting from a single, company-based call center to multiple outsourced centers in several countries covering numerous languages. Although the thought of distributed international call centers seemed like an untenable headache even five years ago, it's now a growing trend for a few reasons: U.S. call centers are expanding their technology and presence internationally; many countries have deregulated their national phone networks; and customer-relationship management software used in call centers has improved.
Outsourcing call-center operations produces several key benefits. Among them: employee retention, streamlined operations, and multilingual service.
"There are two attitudes on customer support: Either get rid of it fast, or manage it well," says Laudensack, who decided to manage the company's customer service by outsourcing it. Outsourcing customer service doesn't have to translate into poor customer service. Call-center operators typically are trained on the products of the companies they represent.
In the United States, about 280,000, or 11%, of more than 2.5 million call-center agent positions are in outsourced facilities run by companies such as Convergys, Sitel, Sykes Enterprises, TeleTech, and West Telecommunications, says Brian Huff, a technology analyst at Datamonitor, an analysis firm. "We've got the processes in place to run efficient call centers, and we have people scouting locations all over the world to match a company's needs with the right people and economy," says William McKinney, director of product marketing at call-center operator TeleTech Holdings Inc.
For a company whose core competency is anything but call-center operations, handling hundreds or thousands of calls a day and managing the resultant information is a huge challenge. Companies must buy and maintain phones, computers, and routers. They must also keep their service representatives happy, despite the fact that many of the calls they're fielding are from unhappy customers.
Outsourcing to a third-party call center enables companies to turn over the employment headaches to someone else. Managing a force of call-center representatives remains a challenge, particularly when these companies need skilled, scarce engineers to answer complex technical product questions.
Trimble Navigation Systems Ltd., the world's largest global positioning device manufacturer, has tackled that problem with a two-pronged approach. Trimble, in Sunnyvale, Calif., has outsourced all incoming calls to Metro Messaging Services in Kansas City, Mo. It relies on its internal customer-service staff to field only emergency technical calls.
The outsourcer E-mails all non-emergency inquiries to Trimble, reducing first-line support calls to its staff, says Candi Faupell, global support project leader at Trimble. It then transfers only emergency calls to the staff. By reducing the number of calls that Trimble's technicians must field, they have become more efficient. Plus, multilingual call-center operators can translate the trouble tickets and pass them on to a technician who doesn't speak the language of the caller.
Although Trimble doesn't have to manage a huge call center, it does work to make sure that customer-service engineers are satisfied. That's why those engineers are rotated through various departments in the company on a regular basis. This gives the engineers a chance to see how everything works, which broadens their expertise, and lets them share their customer-service experience with other divisions. In some cases, the en-gineers have even ended up joining other departments, but that's fine with Faupell. "Virtually none of our technical support engineers leaves the company," she says.
Another important benefit of call centers is their ability to streamline operations. Rather than having multiple call centers independently and inconsistently run by various divisions, companies can rely on a single entity to manage call-center activity in a consistent way with a common network supporting it.
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Photo of Cindy Faupell by Alan Blaustein
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