Scenario
A mid-size European company that has been selling enterprise IT management systems successfully to very large accounts in Europe wants to expand to the US. How can the support team leverage existing processes and tools to create a US support operation and take care of the customers in North America without breaking the bank? What unexpected challenges will they encounter?

The lessons are applicable to any company that is expanding into a new territory, especially one where language, culture, and the time zones are different from the ones at headquarters.

The Challenges
During the initial planning stages, the challenges seemed to be well-defined, therefore surmountable. There would be a different language, to be sure (the company does not hail from the UK). There would be a significant time difference. Case volume would be very small initially until sales caught on. So the decision was to hire a support engineer in North America, give him plenty of time to ramp up since the volume would be low, and rely on the Backline team in Europe to handle any difficult issue. Several months into the venture, as sales were ramping up quite nicely, thank you, the company understood that the obstacles to success were not quite they seemed at the inception.

Product Localization
Yes, the product was translated into English (after all, the company had had many satisfied customers in the UK for years), but it turned out that the localization was not perfect, as exemplified by some pesky error messages that suddenly popped up very much au naturel. While UK customers had somehow muddled through them, accustomed as Europeans are to the strange product descriptions on many consumer items sold in Europe, it turns out that American customers did not tolerate the mishaps quite as well.

Also, as we well know, American English is different from UK English and US customers were bemused or annoyed by the “funny” spellings and word choices.

More importantly, it turns out that the business rules for IT asset management are rather different in the US compared to Europe, so a lot of the built-in processes needed tuning in ways that customers did not expect.

And finally the documentation suffered from the same issues as the product: only minimal documentation in English was available, and again in non-standard American English.

Smaller Accounts
As mentioned earlier, the company’s customers in Europe are very large. They accept long implementation timeframes and are ready to finance several months of consultin to get to a finished product. The deals closed in the US, at least initially, were quite a bit smaller so the opportunities for customizations were limited by budget and expectations. Some customers decided to implement by themselves, without the professional services team, and the outcome was not pretty for either party.

Language and Accents
Certainly the company expected American customers to speak English – that was not a surprise. However, it was a surprise that its best English speakers simply did not have the idioms and accents required to inspire trust and confidence in customers. This was a problem for any serious support issues, for which the experts wer all Europe-based.

Time Differences
Here again the company expected to have to work around the time difference between the continents. What was not expected was the wear-and-tear on the Support and Engineering managers who have to attend several meetings a week outside normal work hours to resolve customer issues. 6am conference calls get old pretty fast.

Cultural Differences inside the Company
The largest and most painful surprise were the different approaches to customers, work (and vacations!), process, and metrics from both sides of the Atlantic. The assumption was that all the employees would be working together to succeed, but there was little awareness of the differences in methodologies, leaving both groups to wonder whether their counterparts really understood or cared about customers.

The Action Plan
Given the situation, and against the wonderful background of steady, if not spectacular sales success, the company and the support team are making some changes that should improve customer success while allowing staff in both regions to work better together. Here are the highlights:

• Work to bridge the product localization issues. As we saw some of the issues are quite complex but the Engineering team is happy to be able to rely on the experience from Support (and Professional Services) to make changes. It’s a good boost to Support to realize that being the Voice of the Customer is an essential role within the company.
• Create a global support team. The initial setup was to have a US Support team reporting to the US country manager and a European Support team reporting to the European country manager. While the European team was assiduous in providing second-line support to the US team, the lack of closer cooperation caused very poor training for the US team, which in turn created more work for the European team. By having the two Support teams function as one it’s much easier to build expertise worldwide – and exchanges help reduce cultural frictions.
• Formalize support processes. While everyone is in one building it’s easy to forget that repeatable, documented processes are the foundation of good support. Without the opportunity to work closely with the Engineering team the US Support team simply could not get its job done. With a slightly more formal request system it can function on par with its European counterpart. (It’s important not to get too formal in a small organization, so walk-by requests are still ok, but they are not the only way to get help.)
• Improve English skills. At least for staff expected to function on an international level (executives, support director, senior support staff) the ability to understand and to be understood by American customers is crucial. Train existing staff and add English skills to the hiring requirements.
• Beef up the expertise US team. While the volume in the US will remain low for some time to come, it’s important to hire and train the US team to function as well as the European team to minimize delays for American customers. The first few hires must be at a senior technical level.
• Build a common knowledge base. The largest challenge so far is knowledge management. Up to now the support team has relied mainly on the case database, lacking time and a mandate to build a serious knowledge base. However, with the language differences it turns out that case notes are pretty much useless outside their geographies. So the big push is to build a knowledge base in English – which has now been defined as the working language within the company.

It will take several months to implement the changes, although the mere existence of the action plan, as well as the realization that the “other side” is different but not really bizarre after all, is greatly helping morale and the likely success of the initiative.

About Francoise Tourniaire……………………………………………….

Francoise Tourniaire is the founder and owner of FT Works, a consultancy firm that helps technology companies create and improve their support operations. She’s the author of One Big, Happy, Multicultural Family? Managing the Global Support Operation. You can find more information at www.ftworks.com or call 650 559 9826.