Costa Rica Call Center Blog

Just a few time zones away, managing an outsourcer in Costa Rica can be relatively easy

By Amy Barrett

Brian Stafford wanted to tap global talent but wasn’t sure how. Stafford, president and chief executive of ChemSW, a Fairfield (Calif.) software developer, liked the idea of using offshore programmers in part because his work needs ebbed and flowed, making it difficult to hire staff. He talked to outsourcing firms in India and Ukraine, but, worried about the time differences and sometimes hard-to-understand accents, never signed a deal. In summer 2008, however, Stafford found a great outsourcing partner for his 22-person, $4 million company. “Costa Rica wasn’t even on our radar,” says Stafford. “But they’ve been very easy to work with, and this allows us to get products to market much quicker.”

Stafford is hardly alone in embracing Latin America as a service outsourcing hub. According to Stamford (Conn.) technology research firm Gartner, 6 of the top 30 countries for services outsourcing are located there, including Costa Rica, Argentina, and Brazil. Much of the appeal, says Frances Karamouzis, a research vice-president at Gartner, is “a high comfort level [there] with Western business practices.”

Stafford discovered Costa Rica with help from Steve Mezak, a consultant with Redwood City (Calif.)-based Accelerance, after hearing him speak at a conference. At Mezak’s request, Stafford detailed his top priorites for an outsourcer: highly skilled workers, a location not more than two hours’ time difference from his in-house developers in Ithaca, N.Y., and a safe and pleasant locale. For a $15,000 fee, Mezak matched those criteria against prescreened vendors and recommended Isthmus, a 150-person company in Costa Rica that works exclusively with small and midsize companies. While India would have been cheaper—Mezak says software development in India costs about $25 an hour per person, vs. $35 to $40 per hour in Costa Rica—Isthmus’ price still beats the U.S., where an outside programmer would run at least $60 an hour.

Having successfully completed a pilot project, Stafford has kept his five-person team at Isthmus almost continuously busy. He doesn’t want to stop and restart work, because Isthmus might have to assign a new team that would need to get up to speed. Stafford is careful to give Isthmus discrete projects rather than responsibility for the core code at the heart of his company. And he makes sure his staff knows exactly how the Isthmus team writes code, so that if the relationship ends he can still manage those projects.

Stafford says David Hessler, his software chief—and the one who has to visit any software partners—appreciates Costa Rica’s climate and beaches. “We don’t go on fancy retreats or trips,” says Stafford. “So in a way, this is a perk. And that doesn’t hurt.”

Source: BusinessWeek

March 9
Ellie Parpis

Major U.S. companies are well equipped to handle Spanish-speaking customer-service calls, a recent market research study found, but few Hispanic consumers are picking up the phone.

A survey conducted by Entrevista Market Research found that the number of Spanish-speaking consumers reaching out to corporations directly is surprisingly low. “There is a very small percentage of Spanish speaking people compared to the [overall] population that are calling into companies,” said Richard Shapiro, president of Entrevista, a division of The Center for Client Retention in Berkeley Heights, N.J. The firm’s clients include McDonald’s, Anheuser-Busch, Bayer and Procter & Gamble.

Entrevista approached its existing clients to learn more about the Hispanic customers that were dialing into their call centers and found that there was not enough data to work from. “They said . . . there are so few calls that we get in Spanish that we wouldn’t have enough names to give you,” Shapiro said. “So we decided to do our own research.”

Entrevista conducted a two-part study in which 1,000 Latino households were called to determine what companies they admired and what they were looking for from their interactions with the companies. The survey found that the companies that scored best offered an 800 number with a Spanish-speaking option, and demonstrated respect when interacting with the consumer.

Five hundred “mystery shopper” calls were then made to the call centers of the top 75 advertisers targeting the estimated market of 35 million Latino consumers. Entrevista determined that 86 percent of the shoppers reached a Spanish-speaking representative or interpreter; more than 85 percent of callers, who reached a Spanish-speaking rep, found that they could respond to their queries directly. Nearly 90 percent of the callers felt their exchanges felt personalized and unscripted; and 80 percent felt the reps took their time to assist them.

Procter & Gamble and Home Depot both fared well. Every call to P&G reached a Spanish-speaking representative, said Shapiro, and the service level was as high as it was with English-speaking calls. Home Depot went the “extra mile,” he explained, not only telling callers which of its stores had a Spanish-speaking manager, but also taking the initiative to provide store hours when they would be on site at the store.

“[Hispanic consumers] want to talk to someone who understands their culture and langue and if they think the companies don’t have those people available to them they are not going to call,” said Shapiro. He also offered some advice to advertisers that want to reach those consumers: “Companies should reach out to the Latino community through writing case studies in Hispanic publications and talking about it in their advertising—that they really want to hear from their Spanish-speaking consumers.”

Source: BrandWeek

March 4, 2009

Costa Rica is the location of Georgia Tech’s newest Trade-chain Innovation and Productivity (TIP) Center. The complex joins the Supply Chain and Logistics Institute in Atlanta and The Logistics Institute Asia-Pacific in Singapore as part of a focused effort to utilize research, innovation and education for increasing trade across borders and making existing trade more productive.

With trade across borders becoming increasingly challenging due to varied components owned by diverse enterprises, the TIP Center aims to combine analytics, digital services and supply chain management to address trade-chain productivity. The goal of the TIP Center is to help develop the knowledge, data, analytics and technology necessary to generate and execute trade-chains and to provide education to relevant and potential stakeholders.

The TIP Center will initially focus its efforts on three trade domains: food products, high-value electronics and digitized business services.

The TIP Center is a joint development of the Supply Chain and Logistics Institute, the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering and the College of Management at Georgia Tech in partnership with PROCOMER and the Chamber of Industries in Costa Rica. The TIP Center will join Georgia Tech in establishing a network of international centers focused on improving existing trade and creating new trade.

A private donor provided initial funding for the center to expand Georgia Tech’s activities in Central America for the benefit of the Costa Rican economy and scientific community. The center will utilize expertise from Georgia Tech as well as Costa Rican universities along with U.S. and Costa Rican partners in government and industry.

Permalink: http://www.gatech.edu/newsroom/newsbriefs.html?m=03&y=2009

• Opportunity arise from need for U.S. companies to reduce costs
• New customers increased need for more employees

While electronic and automotive MNCs suffer from the downturn, service businesses are growing.

The opportunity arises mainly to companies engaged in Outsourcing of Services.

Timothy Scott, director of Azofras explained that in the U.S. and Europe the economic crisis is forcing companies to look into ways to be more efficient, so more companies are looking into outsourcing perform these tasks.

“Some companies expanded their businesses not despite, but because of the crisis,” said Francisco Alba, manager of Experian, which is dedicated to data analysis.

Last year there were 21 new multinational services corporations established in Costa Rica, a record year so far.

The sector is made up of 81 companies under the FTZ alone. These companies together employ more than 23,800 Costa Ricans.

Gabriela Llobet, director of CINDE, said the current economic situation provides exciting opportunity to attract foreign investment. “The country was consolidated as a destination that combines efficiency, quality and productivity”.

Christian Rodríguez, vice president of operations for Western Union, said that although the local growth is not caused by the crisis, but could benefit from it.

“Here the costs are more attractive than those of the Philippines. We could be more aggressive and provide services at lower costs to increase our share”explained.

Western Union came to Costa Rica 10 years ago, has 1,200 employees and provides technical services, accounting and administrative services into the US, Canada, Europe, the Middle East and Africa in over 8 different languages.

Permalink: http://www.nacion.com/ln_ee/2009/marzo/02/economia1888283.html