It is the dilemma of every support department in a company that is experiencing explosive global growth:  How do we keep pace with the increasing and changing workload and how do we meet this new global requirement?   What structure is needed?  What processes need to be adapted or added?  Where do we need to be located?  Have we got the right service offerings in place and do they work globally?  The Technical Support department at Research In Motion (RIM) faced all of these questions.  This is the story of RIM’s journey from an organization that was 90% focused on North America to an operation that now consists of four support centers in three global regions delivering service to thousands of global customers and partners.

The journey begins in January 2001.  The Technical Support department at RIM consisted of two support centers, one located at our headquarters in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, and the second in Egham, Surrey, UK.  The Waterloo center had a staff of about 50 and the Egham center had a staff of about 3.  The work was changing and customers were beginning to expect more of us.  We predicted that interaction volume was on the verge of a rapid increase.  RIM had recently made a change to its business model to focus on a channel strategy that sold primarily through carrier partners.  This new strategy would allow RIM to leverage the partner sales forces, as well as their support organizations, to obtain a level of growth we could not obtain on our own.  Great idea, but it was going to bring challenges to the Technical Support department.  Beyond the increase in workload, we would now have to work indirectly with our customers through the partner Customer Care organizations.  They would be providing TierI and TierII support and escalating to us for TierIII support.  These partners were also going to be distributed all around the globe.

The Strains of Expansion

The decision was made to develop a for-fee support program that we could sell directly to enterprise customers (up to this point, we had done everything for free).  The two primary reasons for developing the program were that we needed to fund a portion of our growth and some customers wanted to maintain a direct support relationship with RIM even though they were buying from partners.  The reasons customers wanted to maintain a direct relationship varied, but the primary ones were: a) they had a very complex support environment because they were buying from several partners, b) they felt that RIM was in a better position to support our products, or c) they wanted to be able to purchase a premium level of support like they could from other technology vendors. 

By the fall of 2002, the Technical Support department had grown to about 90 in North America and 5 in the UK.  However, the two operations were not very closely linked.  We tried having the UK team escalate to the Canadian team before going to development, so that the two teams would have to work together.  This just made the UK team feel frustrated and second-class.  We tried some limited staff exchange programs, which had positive results, but we didn’t do enough of them to really be effective.  So RIM was walking on the global stage with global customers, but the Technical Support department was still operating as two disconnected, regional teams.

As we moved through 2003 and the first part of 2004, our rapid growth continued, both in terms of numbers of staff and numbers of subscribers to the TSupport program.  By mid 2004, we had a staff of about 210 in Canada and 10 in the UK, but we were beginning to experience a labor pool shortage when hiring for our Waterloo support center.  In addition, our global customers and partners were beginning to notice the disconnect between the UK and Canadian teams, and were starting to ask about Asia.  We had made some more progress on integrating the UK and Canadian teams, and began the process to set up a Technical Support operation in the AsiaPac region. 

Our first step in the site selection process of a location for our AsiaPac support center was to identify the criteria for the support operation.  That is, what business objectives were we trying to meet and what outcomes did we want. We assigned a weighting to each of the criteria.  In our case, the criteria and weighting were:

Criteria	Description	Weight
Labor Pool	We needed to find a location that had a reasonably sized and well educated labor pool from which to choose.	25%
Language	Our AsiaPac operation need to support regional business, as well as do off-hours support for North America and Europe, so in addition to English, we needed to be able to attract staff who spoke Mandarin, Cantonese, and in the future, possibly Japanese.	20%
Labor Cost and Stability	The cost of labor was also very important, but equally important was the stability of that labor force.	15%
Facility Cost	The cost of facilities, including operating costs, was a factor.	15%
Others	Other criteria that we needed to consider were the local labor laws and the cost for our HR department to administer them, the general health and stability of the country, the lifestyle of living there (since we would have expatriates there), the cost to travel to other areas of the AsiaPac region, and the relevant Intellectual Property law in the country.	25%

Fairly quickly, out of a host of other possible locations we decided on Malaysia and Singapore as finalists. In the end, we found that although it at first seemed that Singapore was much more expensive when compared to Malaysia, the overall cost of operating in Singapore would only be about 3-4% more than operating in Malaysia.  We made the decision that the operational advantages to being in Singapore more than justified this minor increase in costs.  In the fall of 2004, we started our operation in Singapore with 4 expatriates from our Canadian support center in a temporary facility.  The number of staff members has grown to over 25, most hired locally.

By the spring of 2005, we had a global staff of about 450 and were continuing to hire rapidly.  In fact, the labor pool shortage was getting quite severe.  We had been forced to run job fairs further and further away from Waterloo and pay to move people.  It was also getting harder and harder to find space for the people we did hire.  All areas of RIM were growing quickly and competition for available space was strong, even though the Facilities department kept buying and building new buildings. 

We had the three centers, but we had not integrated them as much as we knew we must.  We came to the realization that what we had was a collection of three globally distributed support centers, not one global support operation.  Upon examination, we concluded that the primary reasons we were not a global operation were due to the way in which we were structured as an organization, as well as the way our systems allocated work.  As illustrated in Figure 1 below, we had a VP in charge of global technical support operations. Reporting to the VP were a Director in charge of North American operations, a Director in charge of European and AsiaPac operations, a Director in charge of our global Premier Support, and a Sr. Manager in charge of our Application Development Support team.  We also had some disjointed management responsibilities.  The Director in charge of EU/APAC also had a team that managed the relationship with new partners as they launched operationally.  The Director in charge of Premier Support had two teams that managed the relationships with partners after they launched.

Figure 1: Global Technical Support - Spring 2005

Our mostly regional structure didn’t seem congruent with our desire to be a global operation with global teams and globally consistent processes and procedures (taking into account cultural differences as required).  By its very nature, our structure segmented us into regional operations. This led to staff having an affinity for their region rather than to the function they perform, which was cross-regional.  As noted above, we had also split the teams that work with partners in a non-technical role across two Directors, although the individual teams themselves were global in nature.  With this in mind, we sat down to design a new structure.

During the process to design our new structure, we went back to first principles.  What did we want to achieve?  In simplest terms, we wanted to become an operation that was global in design, global in function, and global in thought.  We wanted our global partners and customers to view us as a global operation, not a collection of regional operations.  Lastly, we wanted our teams to feel like they were a part of a larger global team that could better leverage the time zone differences in which we operated to provide all levels of support without having to rely on midnight shifts or on-call staff.  Our analysis led us to a structure that put teams that performed similar functions under the leadership of a single Director, without regard to where those teams were located.  This is illustrated in Figure 2 below.

Figure 2: Global Technical Support - Fall 2005

After the restructure, we now had three primary technical teams:

• Initial Response Team (IRT): This team is the first response team for all new interactions from partners and customers with the exception of those from our Premier Support customers.
• Escalation Team & Premier Support (ETPS): This team is really two sub-teams.  One takes escalations from the IRT team and the other, known as the Direct Advanced Response Team, responds directly to our Premier Support customers.
• Partner Support and Service Planning (PSSP): This team assists enterprise customers, partners, and independent developers who are developing applications to work on the BlackBerry platform.

Our next step was to make the teams actually think and work as global teams.  This is on-going, but is being accomplished through two initiatives.  The first is to conduct a high number of personnel exchanges between the different teams to build personal relationships.  The second is through a new implementation of our ACD system.  It will make all support centers look like one center and will distribute all new work to the most appropriate technician, regardless of where they sit.  The escalation teams will retain some affinity for regionalization because of the often intense interaction with customers.

With so much change, the one thing of which we are absolutely confident is that the efforts to have the teams think and operate globally will never end, so it remains a journey of constant improvement. 

In March 2006, we had a staff of about 555 globally, and predicted that we will grow by a further 385 in the coming year.  We believe we have the right global structure in place now, but there will be more changes coming. What do we see for our future growth?   To address the issue of the disappearing labor pool in Waterloo, and to give us site redundancy in North America, we launched a second North American support center in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, in April 2006.  We will also begin the planning to become a multi-lingual operation, a major milestone in our journey to being a truly global operation.  We predict the main feature of our multi-lingual strategy will be to develop a “hubs-and-spokes” model for our support centers.  That is, we will add regional “spoke” support centers to our four “hub” centers.  These spoke centers will be set up in areas where we need to recruit staff that speak particular languages in which we need to offer support.  Our vision is that they will be TierI/TierII centers that escalate back to the hub centers for TierIII support.   Whilst the spoke centers may work in one or more languages, all work between the spoke centers and the hub centers, and between the hub centers themselves, will be done in English.

In conclusion, it has indeed been an interesting journey for us as we’ve traveled from a small, basically one center operation to a global operation that has grown tenfold and now consists of four centers.  We have stumbled along the way, but we have learned many valuable lessons each time.  We by no means believe that our method and structure for offering global support and services is the only one that works, but it works for us and meets the objectives we set out for ourselves as we started along the path.