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.
