October 23, 2000

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Call Centers: Here, There, And Everywhere

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Nonetheless, many global companies are growing fond of global call centers. A key reason why they have the option of streamlined, global call centers is because U.S. call-center operators have taken their call-center process expertise worldwide, where they compete with a number of other vendors, including Telefonica in Europe. "The United States is a few years ahead of Europe, and maybe five ahead of Asia," says Jean Kelly, director of the customer interaction solutions consulting group at WorldCom. U.S. providers have been able to take the lead in call-center products first because of the large consumer pool and deregulated telecommunications, she says.

But as the U.S. providers spread out, they're finding the need to adjust to cultural differences. For example, poor language skills aren't well-tolerated. Customers won't call a service center twice if the language skills aren't up to par.

Also, European callers expect operators to answer about 80% of their questions without reference, Laudensack says. European operators are trained on products for several weeks before they answer a call. In the United States, on the other hand, callers don't have such high expectations. Consequently, call-center operators don't know as much about products off the top of their heads and rely on their computer knowledge bases to provide the answers callers want. That takes a bit longer and often makes it difficult for the representatives to answer follow-up questions.

U.S. operators have discovered the time is ripe for expansion because of reduced regulations of national phone monopolies throughout Europe. During the past few years, competition has emerged, resulting in higher-quality service, more features, and lower prices. That's made it practical and affordable to develop feature-rich call centers throughout Europe.

"Depending on who you talk to, deregulation is either starting or ending now," says Laudensack, who points to recent partnership collapses and consolidations in Europe. Most of the new carriers don't have facilities across Europe, so the option is monitoring multiple relationships with multiple bills, or trying to pick a single transnational carrier.

Another driver in the expanding global call-center business is improved software. Call centers offer home-grown and third-party customer-relationship management software. The tools include in-tegrating E-mail and browser-based data from the client company's database, and co-browsing, which is a guided Web service in which the operator sees what the customer sees on the screen at the same time.

New software has enabled Trimble to move most of its support engineers out of the high-salaried area of Silicon Valley and into its offices in Christchurch, New Zealand, and Hook, England. In the process, Trimble has been able to convert to round-the-clock worldwide coverage and save at least 15% over its old system, which paid for the new software in six months, says Chris Quirk, Trimble's director of global support. These help centers have existed for several years, but they were set up to only handle regional calls during normal local business hours. When Trimble upgraded its data systems to cope with year 2000 remediation, it installed Remedy Customer Support software running over a virtual private network that allows the centers to work as a single, international round-the-clock support group.

All of Trimble's incoming calls are routed to the center in Kansas City. An operator there asks a list of questions and then either routes the call to an available engineer at one of the offices, or creates an E-mail in Microsoft Outlook that goes to the Remedy software on Trimble's business computer. Remedy creates a trouble ticket and puts the ticket into the help system, where any on-call engineer can pull the ticket for service.

Although Trimble and Logitech have outsourced pieces of their customer service, preferring to maintain control of some customer touch points as well as problem escalation, a new trend in outsourcing is emerging: fully-managed vertical service. One example is Percepta, a joint venture of TeleTech and Ford Motor Co.

Percepta will use Ford's customer-knowledge system, which was developed by Andersen Consulting, and TeleTech's worldwide network of call centers, says Don Sparkman, a VP at Percepta. It remains to be seen whether Ford's presence as a partner will begin to attract other car manufacturers to a vertical, international calling center. But Percepta was put to the test recently.

It took on the Firestone/Explorer recall crisis by opening a 350-person call center in Denver--in 24 hours. Sparkman wouldn't get specific, but he says a few large deals are in the works, adding, "We think other car manufacturers will see that an integrated, industry-specific, and rapidly scalable call center is the way to go."

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