The setting
The hypothetical GreatWorks Software company is based in the U.S. and is expanding overseas. GreatWorks sells large systems to enterprises and provides support 24x7. Although most of its customers are still domestic, the company now has customers in Europe and Asia, most notably in Japan, China, and Australia. It’s opened sales offices in those regions but support was provided solely out of the U.S. This is creating problems with the night crew, who used to be paged occasionally with emergencies but is now regularly called by overseas customers. It’s also creating problems with Japanese, German, and French customers demanding support in their native language.

The dilemma
To solve these issues, GreatWorks has two options: Upgrade its U.S.-based support or expand overseas. There are many good reasons for upgrading including:

Simplicity -- Managing one center is a lot easier than dealing with multiple centers, especially ones that are long plane rides away from the home office and where local customs and management requirements are different.

Versatility -- it’s much easier to manage one large team than worry about coverage for smaller products with smaller teams.

Cost -- it’s cheaper to maintain just one support center.

Expanding overseas also has its benefits including:

Language availability -- Except in a few regions of the U.S. (Utah comes to mind), it’s simply not possible to recruit skilled workers who also happen to know Japanese, German, and French. And GreatWorks is not based in Utah.

Culture match -- Even without the multilingual challenge, it’s quite different to support, say, UK customers out of the U.S. with U.S. staff compared to supporting them from Europe with European staff. Local support is typically more effective because of the understanding of sometimes subtle cultural differences.

Coverage -- as GreatWorks found out, staffing the graveyard shift, or even a swing shift, can prove difficult. Most people want to work regular daytime shifts.

The choice
So how does GreatWorks make a decision? It all hinges on volume. At the time GreatWorks decided to open its overseas centers, it decided it needed about three FTEs to cover European and Asian customers respectively. It also figured that over the next year, it would need to double that. Six headcount isn’t negligible; it isn’t that many either (I consider it to be too small for critical mass). However, GreatWorks looked at another factor that tipped the scale: Follow-the-sun support.

At the time the decision was made, the volume of critical calls during off-hours from U.S. customers was equivalent to about two FTEs. That figure was growing rapidly with the acquisition of more high-end customers. Off-hours U.S. calls and the overseas load drove GreatWorks to staff its U.S. center 15 hours a day (4am to 7pm Pacific Time), with pagers used for the remaining hours. Attracting and retaining staff for the early-morning shift was very difficult, and pager duty was becoming an issue, even divided over 30 staff members. If the overseas centers could handle a follow-the-sun model, the U.S. centers would only have to cover an eight-hour shift (9am to 5pm, Pacific), a blissful proposition.

With the prospect of being able to soon keep 10 people busy in each geography, GreatWorks decided to establish support centers in Europe and Asia. The next decision point was location. An ideal support location provides both access to good staff and reasonable cost. This is a difficult dilemma to resolve for high-end support since areas with appropriate staff are often expensive in compensation, rent, and everything else. Most companies choose to locate fledgling support centers with sales offices to reduce overhead costs.
After careful consideration of the labor markets, GreatWorks decided to locate its European support center with the UK office near London. It’s quite easy to find bilingual workers in that area, often native speakers of various European languages. It’s not the cheapest area to work in, but the availability of good staff was paramount. Other companies choose to locate in the Netherlands, also a good place for multilingual talent, and also an expensive one.

The Asian location was more difficult to choose, driven by the requirement to have Japanese-speaking staff (Chinese-speaking staff is relatively easy to find in most Asian countries). GreatWorks chose to locate in Brisbane, Australia where the Australian sales office is located and so far it’s been relatively easy to find Japanese-speaking staff, even native speakers. Costs in Australia are reasonable, certainly cheaper than in Singapore, a popular location for technology companies.

Once the locations were identified, staff had to be hired. For the UK center, GreatWorks found an experienced, multi-lingual manager. He isn’t a native English speaker but has many years’ experience working in the UK and has been able to assemble a strong multilingual team. With a relatively small team (10 people today), it’s still a bit difficult to cover all the languages. For example, there’s only one fluent Italian speaker on the team. But overall things are working well and each staff member can provide support in English, allowing flexibility, particularly with off-hours emergency calls from other areas in the world.

For the Australian office, it was difficult to attract a seasoned support manager since GreatWorks hadn’t established a reputation in Australia (it was easier in the UK since it’s a much larger, more mature market). At the same time, one of the U.S. managers was looking for an adventure and volunteered to head the Brisbane center for a few years. The ability to transfer the experience gained in the U.S. was a big help in jumpstarting the center. The manager was able to find local talent easily and indeed, multilingual requirements have not been an obstacle to hiring good staff. Note: Most companies find that they have to maintain a support center in Japan to support Japanese customers, so GreatWorks has been very clever – and lucky – to be able to use the Brisbane location.

Results
After some time, customers are much happier. Overseas customers still complain occasionally that the support staff isn’t completely attuned to the nuances of the local culture. Let’s face it, a German support engineer living in the UK isn’t quite the same as a German support engineer living in Germany. However, there are no more complaints related to language and U.S. customers are getting better off-hours support.

The U.S. staff is delighted with the shorter hours. Now there are no more early shifts in the U.S. office, and only weekend pager duty now. It took longer than expected to switch to a full follow-the-sun model, since it took a long time to hire and train the overseas staff to the level they needed to handle emergencies. Actually, it took a full year for the UK office and a bit longer for the Australian office who recruited more junior staff.

The overseas staff is now solid. Using the same hiring techniques as the U.S. organization resulted in just one hiring mistake. The same training program was rolled out worldwide and senior U.S. staff spent many weeks at each location mentoring and training. A positive and unexpected side effect was that this created good working relationships between the offices.

Costs are not as bad as first feared. In particular, the Australian location is turning out to be such a good deal that GreatWorks is considering beefing up the staff to handle some of the regular U.S. traffic rather than increase domestic staff.

Career paths are difficult to manage for overseas staff. GreatWorks is working hard to expand its Engineering Support team to be distributed, but there are still many tasks that require being physically close to the engineering group, so this is an ongoing challenge.
The global reach of the support team is regularly questioned: each sales region would like to annex the (successful) support center within it. It’s taking a lot of effort to reaffirm the wisdom of a global team, even as the local support managers work hard to create tight bonds with the local sales team.

Your mileage will vary! GreatWorks was successful with its overseas expansion for two reasons: it had a good critical mass for both locations, and it did a great job of identifying locations that made it easy to hire multilingual staff.

About the author
Francoise Tourniaire is the founder and principal of FT Works, a consulting firm that helps technology companies create and grow their support operations. She is the author of “The Art of Software Support”, a practical guide to creating and delivering training for support centers. For more information, visit www.ftworks.com or call 650-559 9826.