US-headquartered companies were first movers in the outsourcing of customer service and sales support to call centers in India, Mexico, the Phillipines, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, among others. But a countertrend emerged a few years ago when the brand known as ATT yanked its broadband support call center out of India and back to the USA.
Like China and Russia, India has been spending on broadband infrastructure, but it needs to do more to reach the level of the US, Western Europe and Brazil. For its part, Brazil, the fourth member of the BRIC group of emerging economies that will drive the street and digital economy through the rest of the 21st century, has the broadband backbone to support world class customer service but it needs to focus on best practices and software solutions.
With free-zines at newsstands throught Rio, Sao Paulo, Curitiba, Minas and other major metro markets offering 10,000 new customer service call center jobs each week, Brazil-owned call centers face the same challenges as do the big global operators with centers in the US and Canada, Australia and New Zealand including Teletech Holdings and West. Teletech operates call centers in Brazil.
The role of social media in this work-in-progress could be a gamebreaker. But social media needs to grow beyond its own perspective of customer service to support the overarching needs of the social CRM channel. This change opens an important new conversation and framing the issue of customer service in that new paradigm will provide some clues to generating sustainable growth in the new digital economy. Firms in India are already losing $2.4 billion each year due to the C-suite disconnect with customer service. Dealing with the social customer is a people-to-people thing. So like Bonnie Raitt says... let's give them something to talk about...
