Home and Abroad
While offshore contact centers offer costs savings, cultural concerns keep many e-retailers local
By Zak Stambor (http://www.internetretailer.com)
Every country has its own wedding rituals. In the U.S., they can include tiaras to unity candles—not the kind of terms people in other countries would often learn when studying English. That’s why wedding products retailer David’s Bridal Inc. didn’t look far beyond the U.S. and Canada when looking for a provider of contact center services.
“It was essential that agents understood the culture, and were sensitive to the experience of investing a significant amount of money in a gown,” says Dwight Klingenberg, the company’s vice president of profit improvement. “With something so essential to our business we couldn’t afford to introduce variables where you have a language and cultural differential.”
That depth of cultural knowledge isn’t necessary when buying a duvet or a vacuum. Overstock.com Inc., which sells such mundane products online, has outsourced a portion of its contact center live chat work to India for the past five years and been happy with the results—and the cost.
For retailers like David’s Bridal and Overstock that decide to outsource contact centers there are a slew of options available—from vendors whose agents work from home, or in U.S.-based bricks-and-mortar call centers or facilities in Canada, Mexico or another continent.
Whether to consider contact centers outside of North America is a question more retailers are likely to face. That’s because a growing number of retail companies are outsourcing this function, says Peter Ryan, an analyst at Datamonitor, a market research firm based in the United Kingdom. In 2007, the percentage of global retailers outsourcing their contact centers was 17%. In 2009, the percentage grew to 18%, and by 2012, Datamonitor forecasts it will reach nearly 20%.
Source: Internet Retailer
Full Article: http://www.internetretailer.com/article.asp?id=33001