The IT industry likes to celebrate start-ups and small companies rising from nowhere to topple established giants, but large business customers have some requirements that can only be met by the big guys. One of these is global customer support. This is an area that requires experience, technology, and continued investment. The ability to provide 24x7 “follow-the-sun” support across all major time zones, in different languages, to solve customers’ problems, is one of the less-publicized feats of modern business. To do this well consistently across a range of highly sophisticated technologies is remarkable. The reality is that multinational customers, when they make buying decisions, pay very close attention to a supplier’s ability to support its technologies in the customer’s regional theatres, wherever they may be.
Technology companies tend to fall into one of three major categories when it comes to global customer support. Newer, smaller firms generally play in one or sometimes two geographies at first and focus on support in those regions, without needing to support customers globally (yet). Mid-sized companies that have signed on large customers begin to look for partners that can provide support services in their name across the globe. It’s prohibitive for most companies at this level to try to build out their own multinational field service force, so they need resellers, integrators, and third-party maintenance firms who can provide support and field service on their technology. The third category is the large OEM that has invested in and built out its own global services capabilities. Only a few current IT companies approach this level, including IBM and HP. Other large firms such as Fujitsu and Unisys have broad coverage as well. IBM and Unisys in particular have also acted as global service partners for smaller firms over the years.
Talk to anyone involved in the global support side of these businesses, and you find out how tough it is. Customers negotiate hard for service-level agreements that apply across geographies, with consistent pricing, even as the OEM’s face wildly different labor costs, working conditions, and talent pools in various locations. Even automation has to be applied carefully in different countries, as local preferences may prohibit remote monitoring, for example, or reject live chat in favor of telephone support or in-person meetings. The strategy of moving phone support to less expensive parts of the world has occasionally backfired when customers complain about not being able to understand or work with speakers who have a different native language (Dell, to note one example, was bitten by this problem in the mid-2000s). None of this is easy.
EMC Customer Support Builds Out a Global Presence
EMC has evolved from being a primarily North American business to now seeing ~40% of its revenues coming from business outside of North America. With a growing international business, the company has invested heavily in its global support infrastructure:
• EMC Customer Support Services (CSS), with 6,000 professionals, now offers services from 620 service locations in 152 countries globally.
• EMC has a direct service presence in over 50 countries.
• It operates eight Customer Support Centers and seven Centers of Excellence around the world.
• EMC’s global technical support teams also are backed by local support teams.
We expect to see OEMs invest more heavily global support capabilities, especially when revenue growth is expected to come mostly from developing countries in the next several years. If the industry will soon be made up of a few big players, as some predict, being able to support their customers globally will certainly be a competitive advantage, or a disadvantage if they can’t do the job.