International call center roll-out planning

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified)
in
Management and Leadership

I have recently been promoted to head my company's global Customer Support (CS) team.  I am wondering if anyone has any suggested resources for creating a plan to rollout a CS call center Internationally?  We already have customers in Europe and many of these customers are unsatisfied with the CS they are receiving so far.  I have some experience in the CS arena but it has been a while since I was in the CS world.  I have been asked to come up with a recommended CS implementation plan.  I'll likely hire outsourced call center vendors for Europe and Asia because we will need multilingual support.  I'm sure whoever I hire will have template rollout plans but I need some material to include in my plan now to give my executive team a sense of how this is going to all come together.  If anyone has a suggested resource/book/website for creating this plan, I'd like to know about it.

Thank you,

Scott 

Submitted by Matt Smith on Monday November 4th, 2013 2:14 pm

 My experience is a little more focused on small-scale support, but I would make sure the basics are covered:

  • how do the customers contact the CS team?
  • how are issues escalated (multiple tiers with increasing expertise)?
  • how are issues tracked?
  • how is follow-up done?
  • what are the SLAs?

I'm sure I've missed a lot there, and you may, too, on the first pass.  To minimize the risks, I would

  1. get as many eyes as practical on the plan and
  2. try to implement it in stages, with the least critical ones first.  That way lessons learned from the pilot groups can be applied to later deployments.

Best of luck!
-Matt
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Submitted by Andreas Froehlich on Tuesday November 5th, 2013 9:53 am

Hello Scott, 
the first question that came to my mind was: why are your customers already dissatisfied? 
Any chance you can fix this before or while adding an additional layer of complexity? 
My other question is: 
Are you referring to setting up 'simple' call centers, or do you require trained 'technical support engineers'? 
If it is the later: are there good references for outsourcing this to a call center vendor? 
As for a source of information: I like the work of Françoise Tourniaire  http://www.ftworks.com/ . 
Hope this helps,
Karl66

Submitted by Nick Abbott on Wednesday November 6th, 2013 5:47 am

Hi Scott
I have set up more than a dozen call centres/customer support centres (in-house, as an outsourcer and an outsourcee) and best single resource I have come across is Call Centers for Dummies by Real Bergevin; now that I consult I always leave a copy with my clients, but not until the end of my engagement or they might realize that they don't actually need me!
If you don't mind I will offer you two pieces of advice distilled from 16 years of my call centre screw-ups:
1. The old adage of culture being the only thing applies even more to call centres than other business units as they can easily become sweat shops; the best way to stop this happening is a great culture (it is pathetic how long it took me to learn this lesson).
2. When you outsource remember #1 above and also that how well the outsource works is more down to you as the client than your outsource partners.  If you create a partnership based on mutual trust, respect and support it should go great; if you treat the outsourcer as a whipping boy, well you know.......!
Good luck
Nick