Portugal Fujitsu opens flagship Service Desk in Lisbon

Fujitsu Services, one of the leading IT services companies in Europe, has opened a new Service Desk in Lisbon that will support 40,000 users in 106 countries in 12 languages (Portuguese, English, Italian, Spanish, German, French, Dutch, Polish, Greek, Turkish, Swedish and Danish).

The official opening of this Service Desk took place today in the presence of His Excellency the Prime Minister of Portugal José Sócrates, David Courtley (CEO of Fujitsu Services), Andrew MacNaughton (Director of Fujitsu Services for Europe) and Carlos Barros (recently appointed as General Manager of Fujitsu Services Portugal).

Throughout 2008 Fujitsu plans to invest 10 million Euros in the Centre and 4.2 million Euros in each subsequent year. Around 80% of this investment will be directed towards the recruitment and development of people. Fujitsu’s aim is to employ around 500 people in this Centre by the end of 2008.

Why Lisbon?
The advantages that convinced Fujitsu to establish the new Service Desk in Portugal included the opportunity to develop teams with an aptitude for speaking several languages, the geographic proximity to major European customers and strong cultural alignment - the latter being essential for this type of service, which is based upon direct contact with users, understanding of their problems and speedy resolution during the initial contact).

According to Carlos Barros, General Manager of the Fujitsu Services, “The establishment of this Centre demonstrates our continued dedication to the development of our people and Portuguese capability, and has made Portugal a point of reference for Fujitsu Group investment”. Locally developed projects such as inStorevision (for the digital networks market), Smartdocs (document management) and innovative solutions like Scrap (for retail front offices) will continue to establish themselves internationally, demonstrating Fujitsu’s experience and capability in Portugal. ”

“Sense and Respond®” philosophy
The service model used at the new Centre (Sense and Respond) has already received international recognition for the results it achieves by placing people at the heart of the operation through the continuous training of staff and development of specific competences designed to continually improve service for Fujitsu’s customers. This will allow Fujitsu to train highly qualified people in the IT field in Portugal.

According to Sonja Habernig, head of the new Service Desk, “Fujitsu’s work methodology is based on solving customer problems in the first call by applying the “Sense and Respond” philosophy, which requires a highly qualified and proactive team. Multilingual competences, teamwork and cultural alignment are key to these services and the reasons that made Portugal an easy choice.” Sonja Habernig went on to say “We are currently in the process of transferring existing services and new contracts to Fujitsu’s Service Desk team in Portugal because the feedback from our clients regarding service quality and the enthusiasm of Lisbon’s team has been fantastic.”