There has never been a greater desire in the business world to scale beyond national boundaries. It’s not surprising.
The road to scaling in a new country can be long and arduous, filled with regulatory potholes and prohibitive expenses that can bring the whole venture to a crashing halt. But it doesn’t have to be. Read on to learn how to create a cost-effective global presence that will let you build successful relationships with your customers, wherever they are.
1: Choose Your Countries
Where do you need a local presence? Usually the answer to this will be in the countries on your roadmap, the ones where you believe there to be the biggest prospective audience for your products or services.
But depending on your business and what you’re already doing in the region, the extent of this presence can vary dramatically, from a single virtual phone number for sales enquiries or customer support, all the way through to a full physical presence with offices and operations. Think about what the minimum presence you need to achieve your goals in the new market looks like. It might be that you don’t need boots on the ground at all.
2: Find Your Voice
However big a footprint you need in a given country, voice should be one of the first things you consider. Using SIP trunks, you can create a local presence on demand, so you are ready to receive sales enquiries and provide support to existing customers in the area before the ink on the lease agreement for that new shared office space has had time to dry.
3: One Global
As you probably know already to the detriment of your personal health, maintaining a global voice profile has traditionally meant arranging contracts with carriers and investing heavily in onsite infrastructure in every country. That’s before even contemplating the need for staff on the ground. Before you’ve got started, you’re already facing huge expenses as a result of managing separate voice and data networks.
4. Localize
With the right provider, you can get yourself a local DID number in many flavors: geographic, national, toll-free, mobile. Receive calls from your customers and dial them just the same as if you had got the number from a traditional carrier in that country
About customer relationship on global scale
For the customer or end user, the experience in terms of audio quality and latency is exactly what they’ve come to expect when using their phone. If you choose a provider that offers the ability to make domestic, as well as international calls, you will be able to phone your customers and the number will present locally in caller ID, without the country code. A small thing, but one that improves answer rates by 4x.
