Here's a great anecdote: At one international call center, an agent was (after a time) discovered to be ending each customer call with the words "I love you." When his supervisor finally intervened and asked him for an explanation, he stated that he had wanted to show customers that he cared. Which is great.
However, most North American customers don't really enjoy spontaneous confessions of love by strange customer service representatives. Culture mismatch is one of the many reasons why a lot of offshore outsourcing projects don't succeed.
It wouldn't take you too long with a calculator and even ballpark figures to determine that offshoring your call centers could potentially be one of two things: a huge cost savings or one of the biggest expenses your company will ever face. So how do you make sure it's the former and not the latter? A new white paper by Mark W. Brodsky and Dina Vance of Ulysses Learning makes the point that following best practices in hiring, training and management is the No. 1 tool in ensuring success for an offshore call center.
