Proven Strategies for Call Center Mergers & Acquisitions

IT departments represent the largest source of undetected problems. Most times these snags occur because of incompatibilities in tech stacks. For instance, your company may use a Google-oriented tech stack, but the target company might leverage Microsoft. These two don’t mesh well. Other concerns may be found in KM platforms, LMS services, reporting dashboards, IVR, APIs, other software, etc. Analysts work hard to reference tech lists from both firms to identify which systems will likely integrate smoothly and which will not. Tech rarely merges seamlessly. Headaches, however, may be mitigated with foresight and planning. Your due diligence team can point out up-and-coming solutions and those currently used to solve these problems in leading contact centers. Predicting whether two corporate cultures are compatible can be a slippery slope. Assessing the culture of both parties should be a team effort. That’s because it’s partially dependent on the point of view of the ones doing the assessing. A more accurate appraisal will come from a more diverse base of viewpoints. Nonetheless, a company’s culture needs to be scrutinized as part of the process, especially if the new organization is integrated closely with the parent company. Otherwise, the results could be disastrous. Take the case of the Amazon/Whole Foods merger. The culture clash between these two has been widely reported. However, it didn’t appear on anyone’s radar. The friction between blending an impersonal, tight, efficiency-driven tech giant with a loose, values-oriented brick-and-mortar retail chain has ruffled customer feathers and driven out workforce at Whole Foods, the acquiree forced to align their culture with Amazon. The list goes on. AOL/Time Warner, Sprint/Nextel, Google/Nest.

Regardless of the likelihood of culture clash, a well thought through culture blending plan needs to be included in the integration plan should the deal move forward. Taking the best aspects of each culture and combining them into a new super culture is one approach to creating a new organization with a value higher than the sum of its net parts.