Global brands rise or fall based on the quality and consistency of their CX. Breaking into the European market is one thing, but thriving and expanding there is another. Success depends not just on the strength of the products or services you offer, but on your ability to consistently deliver customer experiences (CX) that reflect the unique expectations and cultural nuances of each region.
To meet these challenges, many organizations often adopt distributed delivery models, establishing in-country centers to serve specific geographies. This ensures cultural alignment and access to native-speaking talent, which is crucial for effective customer engagement — especially during marketing campaigns or seasonal peaks.
Testing the limits of distributed CX delivery
Over time, this model can become financially unsustainable and may compromise CX quality and consistency. Juggling multiple centers across different countries increases operational complexity, inflates infrastructure and technology costs, and can make it tough to drive process improvements or standardize quality metrics across regional teams.
Seeking to optimize both quality and cost often leads organizations to consider offshore solutions. But outside of providing support in English, French and Spanish, this can still present significant challenges — particularly for key markets like Germany. The result is more challenges, more complexity and potentially impacting efficiency and customer satisfaction.
And customers notice:
32% of consumers would switch brands because of an inconsistent CX.
Combining simplicity with customer satisfaction
As one U.S.-based multinational audio electronics and technology company demonstrates, there is another way to deliver CX with the agility to adapt to changing demands, ensuring business continuity, and maintaining high standards of customer care while optimizing costs and navigating complex talent landscapes.
It tapped into the depth and diversity of linguistic talent available in Greece and established a multilingual hub for European CX delivery in Athens.
Adopting a disciplined, phased approach, it gradually transitioned key staff from its existing centers to Athens to serve as mentors and brand representatives while local agents were recruited, trained and onboarded.
During each transition phase, legacy centers and the new hub would operate side by side to align on key metrics before Athens would gradually assume full responsibility for a language or geographical region, achieving steady state performance before the next transition began. Thanks to comprehensive governance, real-time dashboards, and cross-functional leadership, the client retained full control, ensuring zero disruption to service delivery over the transition’s timeframe.
Likewise, continuous focus on employee engagement, professional development and wellbeing ensured minimal attrition throughout the process.
A centralized CX strategy
With a single hub delivering culturally nuanced pan-European CX, the company has significantly lowered its operating costs without diluting the quality or consistency of its customer support. Within three months of operations, the multilingual team surpassed KPIs, achieving an average handling time (AHT) of 10:28 (against a 12-minute target), while 92% of chats were answered within 30 seconds (against an 80% target), both of which enabled the team to increase NPS by 14 points.
This approach proves that with the right strategy and partnership, it’s possible for global brands to deliver exceptional, culturally attuned CX at scale — while keeping costs under control and exceeding performance targets.
Discover the full success story and learn the smart path to unifying operations in a single multilingual CX delivery hub.