Local presence is more than an office address

What customers actually evaluated

A 2012 field study examined more than 800 German customers using call centres in Germany, Poland and Turkey. In its analysis, neither detected accent nor centre location was related to satisfaction, trust or word of mouth. Perceived customer orientation—the agent’s focus on the customer—was related to those outcomes.

Ask who owns the next step

Consider a hypothetical enquiry that needs approval from another team. The customer can reach an Icelandic-speaking agent, but nobody can say who will decide or who will reply. A local office would not resolve that missing responsibility. Our suggested service review asks whether contact routes, working hours, case ownership and escalation are clear.

Make the working arrangement explicit

At Icelandic BPO, our directly employed people work from home. We agree working hours, supervision, tools and reporting with each client. Agents can join a client’s existing team under its team leaders, work with a dedicated Icelandic BPO team leader, or operate without a dedicated team leader with agreed direct KPI reporting. Reports can be weekly, every two weeks or monthly.

Before starting, we recommend recording who provides policy updates, who answers an agent’s operational questions and who can approve an exception. In the model without a dedicated team leader, those responsibilities still need named owners. The reporting arrangement should make unresolved cases visible as well as summarise performance.

These are arrangements to define for each project, not evidence that remote work automatically produces better service. Judge the model by the support customers can actually use and the responsibilities behind it.