BCI advice urges Emirates to open CCC in Budapest
Emirates Airlines has announced that it will open its second European customer contact centre (CCC) in Budapest later this year. The choice of the Middle Eastern airline for the Hungarian capital was partly based on the location advice given by Buck Consultants International.
With a fleet of over 200 aircrafts, Emirates Airlines is one of the largest airlines in the world. Emirates Airlines is active on all continents, and flourishes in particular by its successful strategy to position itself as ‘the airline of choice’ for transcontinental flights between Europe and the Far East, with a layover in Dubai. To further meet the growing demand for services from the European continent, Emirates Airlines recently decided to boost its customer service capacity in Europe. The organization already had a customer contact centre in Manchester – on top of the existing centres in Dubai, Mumbai, New York, Melbourne and Guangzhou – but now that the UK location has reached its maximum capacity, an expansion is needed*. The most important question for the airlines was: where to establish the new contact centre?
To assist with the choice of location, Emirates Airlines hired Buck Consultants International, a consulting firm located in Netherlands specialised in economic advice. Together with the consultants, the project team extensively analysed several European locations, and made the well-reasoned choice for Budapest. Karen Bell-Wright, Senior Vice President Retail and Contact Centre from Emirates, explains: “Budapest offers us a population base with the right mix of languages and skill sets, as well as strong telecommunications infrastructure”, The new contact centre will, in addition to the standard customer service issues, focus on bookings for the frequent flyer programme ‘Emirates Skywards’.
Looking back on assignment, Bell-Wright is satisfied with the consulting process. “We found working with Buck Consultants International to be a very positive experience. The team is knowledgeable and professional. Their work was very thorough and they helped us to structure en prioritise our search criteria to gain the most of the review. We are very happy with the selection of Budapest and confident, that with BCI’s support, we made the right decision.”
* Currently the customer service of Emirates deals with 35.000 phone calls and emails per day.
