Customer Service & Retention

Global Site Visit – The Essential Next Step

1 Nov, 2004

By: David L. Ross,Keith Fiveson

So your organization has decided to go global? Where in the world is your company going? How will the various teams manage your operation? Will your company decide to build, operate, lease or outsource? What is the best strategic location for your business?

Before your management team starts performing location analysis or local community evaluations, they need to decide the best strategy for company operations and the company’s ability to support the chosen strategy. If your organization is going to move operations outside of the United States, management will need to have financial and human resource requirements aligned to support a global expansion model or hopes and dreams of global expansion may fall short of expectations.

While outsourcing has become a popular expansion model, as much as 70 percent of organizations directly own and operate their call centers. These companies build, operate and manage their own operations outside the United States. Some organizations are now considering the lease-to-own financial model—also known as the “have-your-cake and eat-it-too” approach to ownership. Regardless of the chosen model, your ability to invest time, money and resources will contribute largely to the site selection process, dictating where or who your site selection team visits.

Rest assured, wherever your company goes—India, Philippines, China, Eastern Europe or the Caribbean, key cultural and management challenges await, whether it is finding enough agents to speak your customers'' languages or finding a management team that is experienced and capable.

Establishing and operating the contact center in a stable and cost-attractive environment is essential. As such, key location evaluation will encompass both qualitative as well as quantitative measures prior to having your site selection team’s passports stamped. Labor issues, telecommunications, technology infrastructure, government policies and financial incentives to support the move will be the most important aspects to evaluate. Planning a trip will be the essential next step.

Where To Go?
A consultative approach is the best way to evaluate the internal and external drivers of where to locate operations for your organization’s contact center. Whether the reasons are financial (EBITA), client-driven (expansion) or operational (around-the-clock support), site selection experts will need to match your needs against a long list of potential global locations to quickly come up with a short list. A quantitative and qualitative matrix is used to score and rank various indices.

Some of the key pre-visit qualitative measures to evaluate include:

  • Availability of qualified and educated staff, including demographics (age, education, literacy)
  • Political stability and economic business climate
  • Availability of full-time, part-time and seasonal staff
  • Proximity of competing call centers (impact on wage, ethics, retention)
  • Training resources
  • Flexibility of labor laws and regulations
  • Availability of key language skills (both native and non-native speakers)
  • Availability of sophisticated and highly reliable, redundant telecom providers/access
  • Ease of access to site/location from major roads, transportation, for employees, site visits for clients and stakeholders
  • Availability of real estate, land, buildings
  • Availability of skilled contractors, integrators, to support or complete project

Some of the key pre-visit quantitative measures to evaluate include:

  • Financial cost of operation, management, human resources
  • Cost of real estate, facilities, land, build out or lease cost per square foot
  • Availability of telecommunications carriers to support and compete for requirements
  • Availability and cost of technology and match with current operations
  • Tax incentives or subsidies from local or central government

Using a matrix of quantitative and qualitative measures, your team will be able to identify the trade-off between cost and quality of locations on the long list. The matrix helps to decide which cluster of locations best meets the companies'' objectives and explains why certain locations have been short-listed, but also—and sometimes equally important—why certain locations are considered non-viable options.

Global Site Selection
While desk and secondary research will help provide much of the quantitative and qualitative measures, it is very important to visit the short-listed locations. Your team will need to get a “look and feel” for the global geographies, to better understand the landscape and socio-economic trends firsthand. This should be done through interviews with similar operations, recruitment agents, associations, consultants and governmental bodies.

In site selection for contact centers, the three most important factors for evaluation are labor, labor and labor. You will want to better understand the availability, quantity, quality, education, flexibility, and cost to staff and maintain your operation. You will want to look at the density of available people as one of the main factors to locate your contact centers.

The Visit
The site visit will include members of the selection team who will get a look and feel of the actual place, as well to verify, quantify and qualify each of the key areas important to your business.

To accommodate the trip and ensure it is a success, it is important to have a lead individual or consultant to line up the visits with government bodies, associations, potential partners and other organizations that are in a similar business to yours. It is very important that your team’s tour includes interaction management, support staff and agents. The selection team will want to evaluate and compare the location(s) using a scorecard methodology. Using a scorecard methodology will help maintain and assess all of the information provided by each of the service providers or agencies. This will be reviewed, shared and compared at a later time by the site selection team back home.

Some of the key in-visit quantitative and qualitative measures to evaluate include:

  • Facilities: Are they cooled, redundant, accessible? Is there an ability to scale agents per cube/workstation? Is there access for physical needs of personnel?
  • Technology: Does the available infrastructure match your requirements?
    Is there an ability to support technology, in an accessible facility with redundancy?
    Is there service and support personnel to support LAN/WAN requirements?
  • Telecommunications: Is there enough available bandwidth and redundancy to site/facility? What is the cost of voice and data connectivity measurements and reports? What types of quality monitoring are available?
  • Human resource alignment of quality: Do resources meet with/align with productivity/quality goals? Do local customs align with established manual procedures?
  • Management expertise: Will you be able to hire locally or will you need to bring over management? What are the local management norms, class or culture issues? How do others deal with problem management/resolution? What escalation procedures are in place?
  • Contact center structure: What’s the configuration of seats? What about the relationships between agents and management?
  • Training capabilities and tools: What are the availability and success rates of recruitment methods? What are the coaching/monitoring; remote monitoring; remote development; accent neutralization; technical skills/management; security measures and practices in place?

Additional Tips For The Site Visit
If your organization is looking at Asia Pacific, we recommend that your site selection team spends two weeks evaluating India, China and/or the Philippines. Spend additional time if the results of your previous work suggest adding Australia or New Zealand to the tour.

For more regional locations, like the Caribbean or Latin America, we still advise your team take a week or two, especially if you are visiting more than one continent.

Most importantly, make sure you schedule some sightseeing and tourism into your trip. This way the team can come to know the cultural and historical significance of each location, as well as its unique characteristics.

It’s Not Easy
Choosing the location for your contact center’s global expansion is not an easy task. Your site selection team will need to align quantitative and qualitative measures with your organization’s strategy before and during the selection of your new global location. Experts such as consultants and local governmental bodies can make things go much smoother. The world is a very big place. With the help of a few key individuals and organizations the world of your business can seem just a bit smaller and your choices a little bit easier. Some additional Resources to help you on your journey are noted below:

Country Information

CIA World Fact Book:

Main web site: http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook

Tourism Offices – Worldwide Directory

Main web site: http://www.towd.com/

Trade Associations:
India: NASSCOM www.nasscom.org
Philippines: CFP www.contactph.org or ITECC: www.itecc.gov.ph
China: CSIA www.csia.org.cn or www.csia.org.cn
ITESA – Asia Atlantic Advisory – www.itesa.com