As companies compete in increasingly global marketplaces, they seek better ways to serve their geographically and culturally diverse customer base, yet little academic research has examined issues of customer relationship management (CRM) in the global context.  Call centers play a key role, and raise strategic and practical aspects of global CRM.  The call center industry illustrates the challenges of integrating the service economy, the digital economy, and globalization.  Traditional call center operations receive (or place) telephone calls in high volume.  In a 24/7/365 business environment with rising customer expectations, call centers often seek to be high tech, while keeping labor costs low and service quality high, and cross borders to help make this happen. 

Company-run and outsourced call center operations are globalizing to better serve customers, to seize new opportunities, and to cut costs.   Call a toll-free phone number for customer service, and it is increasingly likely that the person on the other end of the line will be speaking from another country (perhaps after receiving some accent coaching).  Past allegations of "sweatshop operations" further complicate the picture, as company objectives may come into conflict with the views of other stakeholders in the decisions.  Governments are actively competing for call center FDI.  For example, call center clusters in Glasgow and Dublin face increasing competition from Amsterdam, Bangalore, Auckland, and many other locations. 

Some centers remain focused on traditional telephone inbound or outbound services.  Others operate at the cutting edge of information and digital technology.  Advanced call centers offer full integration of telephone and e-commerce applications, with tracking and coordination of inbound and outbound calls, email, technical and software support, and customer helplines.  These provide an advanced CRM solution, with the optimistic objective of integrating knowledge of all customer touch-points, and improving customer satisfaction.   At an even higher level are category managers that run specialized call centers as part of larger outsourced operations. These outsourcers run entire blocks of back-office operations such as inventory management, fulfillment, web infrastructure, billing and collections, and marketing campaign management, in addition to call center order tracking and customer service activities. 

Call center globalization raises many questions regarding foreign mode of entry, location choice, and post-entry behavior, especially in terms of decisions regarding geographic mandate, and technology and human capital investment tradeoffs.  Unanswered questions include:  What explains call center globalization decisions?  How does call center FDI evolve?  What are the consequences of call center FDI on the firms and the host location?  The evolutionary path of global CRM is unclear and under-researched.  But that is understandable, given the abundance of conflicting views and definitions of CRM.  Analysis of the call center industry may provide a good starting point for understanding how companies can better manage their relationships with their geographically and culturally diverse customers.