Opening a contact center or call center in Latin America

Max Levine (mlevine@callcenteradvisors.com)

Last May I sold a technology firm I founded in 2000, an IT consulting firm based out of the Bay Area in Northern California to a Private Equity Group. We had large clients like Kaiser, Wells Fargo, Genentech, UHG, Levis and others. We were about $60 million in revenues.

Outsourcing to Latin America

A big part of our success was outsourcing sales, direct response work and inbound campaigns to Latin America. Eventually we had success in these countries beyond my wildest imaginations and in ways I would not come to realize until much later.

India versus Latin America

I spent close to 18 months butting my head against the wall in India (an automatic pit stop for most first timers). After partnering & eventually owning call centers in Asia we achieved success from a cost saving perspective but could never really eliminate the accent issues and stigma being created within our client base. Although we could never assign specific numbers to how much we lost from a perception perspective we felt the risk of hurting our image was not worth the immediate cost savings.

This is what brought me to Latin America. At first we tried to reach out to call center owners and consultants that claimed the new Latin America Call Centers but eventually realized to really understand it we would have to go first hand. I took a deep plunge and literally spent almost 300 of 365 days in my first year touring and living in call centers between Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Guatemala, Argentina and Columbia.

I spent countless hours analyzing Inbound, Outbound, Direct Response, Sales Campaigns of all types, Customer Service and much more to understand which countries and call centers did what better than others. I focused not only on objective measurements but dove deep in to areas that had much more subjectivity. I created a Matrix (get a free copy at www.callcenteradvisors.com) that examined each Latin American country on 30+ criteria to create comparative ratings.

The results were astonishing

Some of the countries had more aggressive personality types and were better at sales.

Some were horrible at sales – the accent was hard to overcome.

Others had larger percentages than others of people that had lived in the US for over 2 years.

Others had a more passive nature, were easier to manage, took less hand holding and performed much better in certain inbound customer serivice rolls.

One of the countries rolled out the red carpet for us.

Other literally ignored us.

Some of the countries have political climates that support employees in specific types of call center jobs in ways that could hurt an outside employer coming in.

One of the countries literally handed us over qualified employees daily, as a free referral service.

We found call centers in every country that ranged from amazing to downright miserable. (more on these in my next blog)

The list goes on.

Anyway I am very interested in sharing my detailed experiences & analysis with any clients considering relocating to Latin America. I have set up relationships with 100 (and continue to refine these as we use them) of the top call centers in Latin America. I live between 6 countries in the Latin American hemisphere and try to get involved directly in making sure the referrals I make stick. The call centers pay the fee, which is minimal and I guarantee both the call center and the client that they will be satisfied. I don’t get paid if both sides are not happy.

Visit us at callcenteradvisors.com and drop us a line to chat further.

Max Levine (mlevine@callcenteradvisors.com)