How to succeed with international expansion online

International expansion of affordable eye glasses

 

Roy Hessel, CEO, EyeBuyDirect.com, Bethesda, Md.

Our company’s mission is to make affordable eyeglasses available to people everywhere in the world. 

In the end, our international expansion was a huge success.

Our eyeglasses are sold online, across the world. We focused first on the U.S. market because it was the easiest place to get a foothold. We expanded into the European market primarily because of the region’s widespread use of credit cards. 

The first step to dealing with this was simple enough: We translated our website. 

Our customer service inquiries in Spanish, Italian, German, and other languages went through the roof but we didn’t have the staff to handle these multi-lingual service requests.

Dual strategy for expansion in new markets

For starters, we hired new employees once it was clear we had a certain level of demand in that language. We would assess the amount of emails we got in French, for example, and hire a representative when we had surpassed a certain number. We have a location outside of Paris that services all of Western Europe; this location also makes it easy to hire representatives in the area who speak multiple languages.

We also used new language hires as a resource for expanding into new markets. For instance, we didn’t have a lot of Japanese inquiries, but I saw Japan as a market with a lot of opportunity. So we hired a customer service representative from Japan because we knew that she would be an invaluable in-house resource. Employees native to a country can easily do research on determining the right price points for products and look at what the competition is doing. This employee helped us break into the Japanese market.

Keeping our international staff happy

Our customer service staff at locations in San Francisco, Manchester, England, Paris, and Shanghai do activities together, off-campus activities like sports.  Relationships have developed among our 200 employees and turnover is low because we believe people have a place to be themselves. And if they’re learning from their colleagues, and enjoying spending time with them, they are more likely to be patient with customers on the phone.

– As told to Caitlin Elsaesser