Digital River, a provider of e-commerce services, said that it is outsourcing the majority of its global customer service operations and realigning certain other resources to support growth opportunities. The company said that these two steps will result in the elimination of about 120 positions globally.
The company plans to outsource its global customer service operations to Tennessee-based Sitel, a business process outsourcing provider. Beginning September 2009, majority of customer email and phone inquiries will be managed by Sitel’s customer service centres, which include more than 150 facilities worldwide.
Digital River will also maintain a team of customer service personnel in its Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Shannon, Ireland, offices to service customer inquiries not managed through Sitel. Digital River expects that this organisational change will drive efficiencies for the company beginning in the fourth quarter of 2009.
Joel Ronning, CEO of Digital River, said: We are taking these actions to ensure that Digital River is well positioned to deliver high value to clients, rapidly scale on a global basis and further capitalise on our sales pipeline. We manage online businesses on behalf of thousands of companies around the world – e-businesses that must be up and running 24 hours-a-day on global and local levels.
By working with Sitel, we can more efficiently and effectively meet our clients’ increasing global business requirements. We will be able to offer more flexible staffing, expanded support in emerging markets, added multi-lingual capabilities, and in the near future, new global services such as inbound and outbound telesales.
Digital River said that it is also making organisational changes to realign certain other resources to support key growth areas, including sales and product development.
The company plans to open new positions to accelerate the development and launch of more than a dozen new e-commerce products as well as capitalise on sales opportunities in the consumer electronics, small- to mid-size business software, subscriptions, games and business-to-business markets.
