Multi-country telemarketing: centralise or decentralise?
How to choose which way to go

Celsius International, 2012

HOW TO CHOOSE WHICH WAY TO GO

Multi-national corporations who want to run the same telemarketing campaign in several countries have two basic options: centralising the whole process in a single multi-lingual call centre or decentralising it to local call centres in each country. Which is best? As so often, it depends on your actual needs.

ECONOMICS
Let’s start with the economics. Due to the additional costs of recruiting and retaining an agent team consisting of speakers of different native language (and, to a limited extent, also higher telephone costs), multi-lingual call centres will generally charge more per agent-hour than their conventional cousins. On the other hand, identifying, briefing and setting up a single call centre will inevitably be cheaper than doing the same with several.

So let’s look at a scenario or two. We’ve assumed that the average cost per agent-hour in single language call centres in Germany, UK and France is €32 – in Celsius’ experience, UK may often be a little higher and Germany rather lower, but €32 is in our view a reasonably realistic round number. But multi-lingual call centres, in areas where expatriates are available (for example, Paris, London or perhaps near the language school ‘hotspots’ on the south coast of the UK), are in our experience more like €40 per agent hour.

Now let’s assume two B2B outbound programs. One is to call 1,500 companies and obtain contact names, and the other to contact 15,000 organisations to confirm data and generate leads. The costs involved are not too difficult to calculate. For our smaller program, centralised is likely to be at least 17% cheaper because set-up and reporting costs (yours’ as the customer as well as what the call centre charges) offset the higher call rate per hour (see table on next page).


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