DENVER CO – Contact center executives strive to balance two competing objectives:  providing excellent service and doing so efficiently.  The executives running contact centers for one of the world’s largest travel companies had a bigger challenge than most.  Due to rapid growth, they needed a plan to balance these competing objectives on a worldwide basis.  They recently hired the contact center consulting experts from Eventus Solutions Group to perform a global footprint analysis to determine which sites around the world will allow the Company to provide the best service to its global customer base at the lowest cost.

Many companies locate their contact centers using a relatively conventional formula.  They either find relatively low-cost locations near their existing customers or facilities, or they go offshore to countries that have developed reputations as low-cost areas.  For this Company, the traditional model was a non-starter.  Due to the nature of their business, they have customers everywhere.  Plus, they have locations everywhere.  Hence, their contact centers could be almost anywhere.

To help this Company create an optimized global contact center footprint, Eventus is utilizing a unique and proprietary Location Benchmarking Model that can rank and score over 1,000 metro areas in 50+ countries around the world.  The model allows comparison of alternate locations based on variables such as labor market size, labor availability, labor costs, industry presence, business climate, infrastructure quality, geopolitical risk, real estate costs and utility costs.

To establish the proper weighting criteria to use in the Benchmarking model, the Eventus team conducts a comprehensive needs assessment. They interview executives from different geographies and functional areas to solicit their business requirements and operational needs for their specific areas.  The needs this analysis uncovers became inputs into the final selection criteria.

After using this model to rank candidate locations, Eventus uses its extensive market intelligence to perform a rigorous location analysis of finalist locations in the US and globally.  The output of this work will be comprehensive location profile reports with critical demographic and labor market statistics such as population and project growth rates, education attainment, income distribution, cost of living, labor force size, language skills, competitor market saturation, real estate availability and other factors specific to the project.  Eventus also identifies back office competitors, prepare salary comparisons, evaluate local employment drivers, and evaluate risk factors including terrorism, crime, business continuity, political and financial stability.

Contact center selection criteria have changed dramatically over the past five years.  While there used to be a relatively small number of tier 1 sites to consider, there are now numerous additional tier 2 sites that are just as good as those in tier 1.  Partly this is because telephony costs are no longer the primary business driver.  Also, tier 2 locations can now match the tier 1 locations in critical factors such as labor costs, language support, availability skills, education and quality of life.

“The number of viable contact center locations now available both in the US and worldwide can come as a shock to anyone in the industry who has not made a site selection for a few years,” said Craig Tobin, Eventus Solutions Group managing director. “Given the number of options that need to be considered, the only way to optimize a location footprint is to combine a rigorous data-driven quantitative analysis with extensive business acumen and local market intelligence.”

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