Acres of newsprint’s been devoted to call centre jobs being relocated to India by businesses eager to slash overheads.
Critics have repeatedly claimed the migration of jobs overseas has sounded the death knell for true customer service. Scratch beneath the surface, however, and it’s clear UK call centres are in better shape than you might imagine.
Chey Garland is proof. The reigning Veuve Clicquot Business Woman of the Year founded Garlands call centres in 1997 and she’s never had it so good. Turnover hit £36.4m last year, alongside growth of 29% – most of it organic. Growth in 2004 was an even healthier 74%
So how is she managing to raise the bar when clients are offered foreign call centre staff with wage demands just a tenth of their UK counterparts?
It’s simple, she insists: “Happy customers are more receptive to finding out more about our clients’ products and services.” Ergo, sensible businesses with call centre requirements will do anything in their power to keep customer satisfaction levels high.
“If a business has got an agenda for just finding the lowest cost, that’s their prerogative, but the growth of our business speaks for itself. Our clients, without exception, feel customer retention is a big issue.” No wonder work for clients such as Vodafone, Cable & Wire- less and Virgin Mobile has increased in volume without exception over the past two years.
Focusing on staff development
Garland’s also been cute enough to strategically take on contracts with clients that are expanding rapidly or operating in fast-growing sectors, ensuring she can grow her client teams with their needs. This has meant investing heavily in staff training and development to allow employees to take on increasing amounts of her clients’ workload rather than taking on stop-gap employees who view their futures elsewhere.
Garlands staff can deal with an array of tasks, such as billing enquiries, credit control, technical diagnostics, pro-active retention work and outbound selling. This contrasts with many call centres where low-skilled workers merely read information from screens. It’s a commitment to quality that sets the business apart from many competitors.
Throughout the interview, Garland enthusiastically quotes a recent DTi report that paints a healthy picture of the domestic call centre industry. The sector is on course to employ more than one million people for the fi rst time in 2006, with outsourcing making up 28% of the growth.
She’s particularly keen to slay the perception of call centre jobs flooding overseas, pointing out that just 3% of calls are answered offshore. Although this obscures the fact the industry has been severely challenged by lower overheads enjoyed overseas, there has been a significant change in clients’ mindset. It appears customer frustrations over offshore call centres are beginning to infl uence outsourcing strategy.
“We temper a cost versus value argument – yes, it costs less to put in voice recognition software or go offshore, but ultimately it’s in the value,” argues Garland. “The industry’s changed hugely. When I started, everyone was obsessed with a grade of service, such as how long it took to answer the phone. While these measures still have their place, more organisations at board level are now interested in seeing the customer satisfaction score.”
Steve Morrell, a call centre analyst at Contact- Babel, feels the future for the likes of Garland is good. “There’s quite a lot of customer dissatisfaction surrounding offshore contact centres,” he says. “A few years ago, there were jobs fl owing out of Britain – that’s slowed to a trickle now and some of it is fl owing back. It’s a very political issue, both internally and externally because they can’t turn around and say ‘we were wrong about offshoring.’”
The dilemma for businesses over whether to offshore or not has been further complicated by a lack of tangible savings. Although salaries are meagre on the Indian sub-continent, staff turnover is huge, putting a strain on recruitment and training programmes. Businesses are also burdened with IT and telecoms costs similar to those in the UK, with the additional headache of hiring management and external consultants to build and run the centres.
Throw in the negative publicity over calls being answered outside the UK, and it’s clear to see why many boardrooms are starting to see offshoring as a tainted proposition. The switch of focus back to the domestic market may have slipped beneath the media’s radar, but Garland has seen her strategy vindicated.