Customer Care Across Borders
Part 2: Don't Go it Alone
In my last article I discussed some of the country, city, and neighborhood considerations involved in establishing a new center of operations in a foreign country. If considering everything from political stability to local transportation seemed overwhelming, especially when considering a country you may never have visited, I have some good news for you in this article: You don't have to go it alone. There are many organizations, both public and private, to guide you.
Based on my own experience, I'll offer three examples of help from three different parts of the world. There are, however, many other organizations offering similar services.
Let's begin with site selection and setup, taking an example from the United Kingdom. BTeLocations, the Inward Investment arm of the BT Group, offers turnkey site solutions throughout the UK. They help you search for a location that meets your specifications, establish telecommunications and IT infrastructure, and even find the necessary business services to get you up and running. BT can do this effectively not only because they have a vast inventory of telecom services, but also because they have partnerships with other vendors that enable them to offer you lower startup costs and faster setup times.
In case it suits your interests, BT has also established industry-specific groupings throughout the UK, locating like-minded companies in the same business parks. Examples include the International Financial Services District in Glasgow, and the Cambridge Science Park, located north of London, which has a close association with Cambridge University. Such locations not only offer some business synergies but they become attractive recruiting destinations.
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Cambridge Science Park
To meet the needs of employees who are moving from one country to another, you might consider a second type of assistance, that of a relocation or destination services company. Firms like PRS Europe, an employee mobility firm headquartered in Brussels, offer services that include immigration legalities, outbound moving, and acculturation activities. Employees benefit by having someone else navigate the maze of the new country's requirements. Employers benefit because employees are productive sooner and better able to focus on the new enterprise.
Like BteLocations, PRS Europe also offers office location selection and setup, and help with the legal aspects of tax and trade registrations.
The third area of assistance addresses what is usually the biggest concern of expanding across borders: new legal and governmental requirements. A good example, from the other side of the world, comes from the Korean Investment Services Center (KISC), which provides up-to-the-minute information to foreign companies that wish to invest in Korea. This information ranges from market conditions to consultation on specific investments, including mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, and real estate acquisition. They also advise on legal and taxation matters.
KISC is a government-funded organization, part of the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency (KOTRA) established in 1998. This non-profit organization operates 101 Korean Trade Centers throughout the world. Most of their work is done for free, or at a very reasonable cost.
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Seoul, Korea
KISC can help at both the country level and the regional level. It may make more sense, for example, for your company to locate in Pusan on the southeast coast, rather than in Seoul, the capital city. As I mentioned in my last article, an important reason for paying attention to regional differences is that some offer tax breaks to provide incentives to companies to locate in their borders. In one company for which I consulted, working with advice from KISC, we applied for a large tax exemption because we were introducing new technology into the Korean market.
The moral of the story in all these examples is that you don't have to go it alone. There are many organizations to assist you in establishing a new business center abroad. Charges for these services vary, and some are quite low. But the important thing to remember is that the cost of doing business inefficiently, or even incorrectly, could be very high, whereas your investment in the right assistance could yield a very large return.
Organization websites
BTeLocations - www.bt.com/btelocations
PRS Europe - www.prseurope.com
Korean Investment Service Center - www.kisc.org
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