International Marketing | Destination Call Center

Customers in Canada and Europe are just as likely to call you for service as their American counterparts. In fact, some sectors of American industry — travel reservations and high tech, for example — have been setting up call centers outside the US for some time.

Hardware and software companies like Intel and Microsoft have globe-girdling linked centers that answer calls related to the same product lines they sell domestically. Hotel chains and airlines are in the same predicament — they deal with customers who could be located anywhere, and who want to travel into and out of the US.

For companies like those, borders mean little when a customer calls. Other issues come to the fore:

• Answering the call in the right language.
• Taking orders in the right currency — and not losing time or money exchanging that currency back into dollars.
• Appearing transparent to the caller — “non-national,” or as little like an American company as possible.

If you’re getting the impression that most international call centers are inbound, you’re right. For a variety of reasons, telephone selling is not as popular outside the US as it is here. In Europe, that has a lot to do with privacy regulations and restrictions on the way companies can sell over the phone. Lack of customer lists and databases also plays a role.

Other factors include the price of long distance service and incredible number of languages and cultures crammed into one very small continent. All the changes that must be made to accommodate those languages and cultures means that telemarketing does not have the same economy of scale in Europe that it has in the US.

Many companies take their first step overseas with a customer support center. They find that to grow overseas, they need to provide assistance to existing customers already gathered by overseas subsidiaries. These tend to be larger companies.

As you send salespeople around the globe to dig up new customers, you’re going to need international call centers to support both sales and service. But it’s even harder to make an overseas site selection than it is in North America. Questions of language, culture — and of course complicated economics — all come into play.

Look for the same things you would in the US: labor pool, telecom infrastructure, regulations and taxes, education. But look harder, and deeper. Comparing the incentive packages from different countries (with different currencies, tax rates, languages and levels of technology) can be frustrating.

Outsourcing

Outsourcing options range from simple call accounting to complete responsibility for telecommunications (staffing, provisioning, negotiating with carriers, and efficiency studies). QuantumShift, for example, offers to become the telecommunications function of its customers. By negotiating with carriers, understanding the details of cost savings, and managing assets, the high-end service provider can presumably offer a better total package than end customers can obtain for themselves. All the usual pros and cons of outsourcing apply:

• Pros:
  • The provider is specialized in telecommunications and cost management, and thus develops expertise.
  • Costs are controlled by leveraging relationships with other providers (e.g., AT&T, MCI, Avaya).
  • Outsource staff have a career path in their specialty, whereas within the client organization telecom staff have limited upward movement opportunities.
  • The provider can leverage processes learned across multiple clients.
  • The provider may make specialized software and hardware available so that the client avoids some up-front capital expense.
  • Reporting, cost distribution, and call accounting are well developed and usually provided via Web browser screens.
• Cons:
  • The interests of the customer and the provider may not exactly match.
  • There is some loss of control over the process.
  • Technology enhancements could take a back seat to well-defined, transaction-oriented charges. In other words, if the entire contract is written so that the service provider is paid solely on a defined transaction basis (interstate minutes, number of T1s, etc.), there could be a tendency to maintain the status quo. Codicils should be put in place that maintain incentives to continually review new technology and implement as appropriate.

The Request for Proposal/Request for Quotation

The individual responsible for initiating an RFP/RFQ should consider the following "philosophy" questions before moving forward:

• What is the end result? Lower costs, better service, specific functional requirement, or perhaps (legitimately) to demonstrate that the current provider is the best and no others can compete.
• Is it worth it? RFPs/RFQs are time-consuming for all parties. Sometimes it is better just to buy a hammer at the nearest store, regardless of its price. What economic or "political" conditions would make an RFP/RFQ mandatory?
• Is the document to be highly detailed? Is there enough information to write a worthwhile RFP, or will vendors be spending fruitless hours guessing what is required? For example, when bidding on a large PBX installation, the vendor needs to understand the number of digital and analog lines required because these drive the quantity of line cards, shelves, etc. If the RFP is too high level, one of two outcomes will result: (1) some potentially strong vendors will not participate or (2) bidding vendors will increase their prices to cover unforeseen costs. A third, less-savory practice is the deliberate underbidding on a vague RFP with the expectation that profits will accrue from the many change orders that the vendor knows will be required.
• How can a good list of suppliers be obtained? Should a two-step process be followed, with a first wave of perhaps ten respondents and a second tier of three for the most thorough review?
• How is the evaluation to be done? Who has the time, qualifications, and objectivity to do it?
• How much education is required from the respondents? Does the organization need key evaluators to attend demos, talk to references, etc.?
• What can be done to make an admittedly "fuzzy" evaluation process more fair? Will the "non-winners" be provided with a full explanation of the final decision?
• Will proposal content from the winning bidder go directly into the contract? This is an important requirement for the buyer because it ensures that the features and benefits presented in the proposal become contractual requirements.
• Will price increases be allowed? If the bidding and evaluation process takes several months, it is possible that the respondents' costs have increased in the meantime.

Voice and Telephony Security

A company's vulnerability to threats varies by its size and business type. For example, businesses that frequently engage in intense international bidding may find themselves in competition with a government-owned organization. Because the government often owns the telephone company as well (PTT), there is a temptation to "share" information by tapping the lines (all it takes is a butt set and knowing which trunks to tap into). While such occurrences are undoubtedly infrequent, they are a threat.

Toll fraud, on the other hand, is ubiquitous. Hackers use stolen calling cards to find a vulnerable PBX anywhere in the world and sell the number on the street (mostly for international calls). Poorly controlled voicemail options and DISA (direct inward system access) are excellent "hacker attractor" features. Medium-sized installations are preferred because they offer enough complexity and trunking to allow hackers to get into the system and run up the minutes before detection. Smaller key system sites do not have the capacity, and larger sites often (but not always!) have toll fraud detection systems (such as Telco Research or ISI Infortext's TSB TrunkWatch Service).

Two characteristics of the telephone system enhance the hacker's world of opportunity: (1) it is difficult to trace calls because they can be routed across many points in the system; and (2) hacking equipment is relatively cheap, consisting of a PC or even a dumb terminal hooked to a modem. Hackers (a.k.a. "phone phreaks") sometimes have specific PBX training. It could be a disgruntled PBX technician (working for an end-user organization or the vendor). In addition to their technical background, hackers share explicit information over the Internet. These individuals have a large universe of opportunity; they hack for awhile on a voice system, find its vulnerabilities, and then wait for a major holiday and go in for the kill. Losses of $100,000 over four days are common. If holes in one PBX have been plugged, they go on to another. In some cases, they use a breach in one PBX to transfer to another, even less secure PBX.

The final category of security break, malicious pranks, gets inordinate attention from senior management — far beyond the economic damage usually incurred. For example, a voicemail greeting could be reprogrammed (just by guessing the password) to say, "Hello, this is Mr. John Doe, CEO of XYZ Company. I just want you to know that I would never personally use any of XYZ's products." Of course, not all changes are minor. A clever hacker who obtains control of the maintenance port can shut down all outgoing calls or change a routing table — there is no end to the damage if the maintenance port is compromised.

The Future for Satellite Technology

Although traditional VSAT technology, with its minimal uplink bandwidth, is not appropriate for some organizations, the newer systems in development should be reviewed by network architects. For example, Hughes' new system under development, the Spaceway system, is expected to provide a variety of low-cost broadband services with small satellite dishes, with data rates ranging from 512 kbps upstream and up to 30 Mbps downstream. Applications will include Internet access (with a strong multimedia component) to LAN/ WAN solutions for work-at-home employees, SOHOs, and large organizations.

Hughes' system includes full mesh point-to-point and multicast communications architecture. This allows the development of high bandwidth peer-to-peer applications, such as file sharing, distributed databases, and decentralized content distribution.

The availability of reasonably fast Internet links in rural areas around the world could significantly change the business dynamic of many firms. While the media continually laments the lack of bandwidth, the most serious deficiency of the Internet is actually the lack of geographic coverage.

Another alternative architecture is a hybrid system that uses satellite transmissions for downlink and terrestrial for uplink (currently used to provide Internet access to areas with no other broadband availability). Because satellites are large (many tons), they have power plants that allow megabit-per-second downloads of video, software upgrades, and other information. The terrestrial link in this asymmetric data access scheme provides for less latency (delay) for the user response. Most applications, as is the case with home Internet users, consume far more download bandwidth than upload bandwidth.

The technology of caching will be increasingly used for Internet services. Caching takes recently retrieved information, copies it, and places it on a server close to the consumer. This process allows users to access popular Internet data quickly because it is physically located much closer to the user. The more users are associated with a cache, the more the benefit because there will be a higher likelihood that a requested file will be in the cache. This could potentially speed the deployment of international intranets for global organizations. Caching is relevant to satellite transmissions because it reduces demand for repetitive uplinks from the hub for frequently used pages.