Glasgow: The location for a twenty-first century contact center. (RE: Locations).

This past autumn, I, as Customer Inter@ction So1utions[R]' roving editor-on-the-spot (a self-anointed title, but I like it), had the unique experience of visiting Glasgow, Scotland, with the intent of looking at the city as a European call center location. The concept of locating in Europe, in the U.K. in particular, is generating increasing interest among many of CIS' readers who are interested in locating operations off-shore. To this end, I was invited to tour Glasgow's new International Financial Services District (IFSD) with representatives from BTeLocations, the inward investment branch of British Telecom (BT).

In August of 2001, Scotland's First Minister, Henry McLeish, launched the International Financial Services District with the intent of making the city one of the most high-tech locations in Europe for a vast array of services. The IFSD is a financial-industry-specific, pre-equipped business area that was designed for fast-track locations by both U.K. and international firms looking to get multichannel customer contact centers up and running quickly. To develop the area to its potential, BTeLocations, in partnership with Scottish Finance Enterprise, Scottish Development International, Scottish Enterprise Glasgow and the City of Glasgow, has invested heavily in the area and identified it as a prime location for call centers, particularly those within the financial services sector. Glasgow, which already has a lively call center presence, is felt to bean ideal, "ready-made" location for technology-driven business; the IFSD possesses state-of-the-art connectivity and network infrastructure (including the deployme nt of next-gen ATM switching, and IP infrastructure and fiber-optics) and benefits from the presence of BT Ignite Content Hosting/BT Ignite Data Center, which offers Web hosting and storage solutions in addition to both physical and data security, round-the-clock support and direct access to BT's high-speed, high-bandwidth Internet backbone.

The entire area, which sits on the River Clyde and is proximal to the M8, Glasgow International Airport and the Glasgow Central Station, has a unique new-meets-old feel to it; many of the buildings that comprise the IFSD were completely rebuilt, keeping only the original cleaned and sand-blasted facades. The results are buildings that look stately and traditional on the outside, but become twenty-first century on the inside.

Said John Campbell of BTeLocations (with whom I had a pleasant lunch by the river and a particularly nice piece of seared ahi tuna), "There are few more competitive and crowded markets in the world today than the finance sector, whether it be retail or wholesale banking, insurance or investment management. The IFSD is a direct result of these challenges, the new electronic economy and the changing profile of investment projects. BTeLocations is leading the way in answering the needs of the 21st-century finance company."

An additional benefit that Glasgow offers is ready access to a labor pool of computer-literate individuals, many of whom are multilingual.

Glasgow's International Financial Services District is the most recent addition to BTeLocations' portfolio of investments in business, technology and science parks.

While these days, the lure of Southeast Asia seems almost impossible to escape, I've noted the rising appeal of the U.K. for potential sites; Glasgow, among other U.K. cities and regions, is a modest six-hour flight from New York and involves far less of a cultural adjustment for North American companies than Southeast Asia.

And then there's the beer....

For more information, contact John Campbell at [phone] or [e-mail].