Thanks to a commitment to service, innovation, and solid management
Sitel appears to have been better prepared than many other major teleservices firms to meet today’s business challenges and opportunities.
Those attributes led Sitel to be named “Best Performing Contact Center” in the fifth annual
Global Services 100 survey. According to Global Services magazine, which published the
Global Services 100 list, these rankings were based on a demonstrated pattern of market leadership, innovation, and customer service. This is Sitel’s fourth year as a category winner and fifth year included among the Global Services 100 list.
Sitel has sorted out best practices and operations arising from the Sitel/ClientLogic merger in 2007, enabling it to withstand the tough economic winds and enabling it to be ready for new opportunities. It launched and has quickly expanded its HomeShore home agent program in 2008 just as businesses, feeling the cost pinch yet needing to ensure quality, began looking for options to traditional domestic, nearshore, and offshore contact centers.
Sitel, which is owned by Canadian private equity firm Onex, has not been immune to the economic conditions. It experienced a net decline in revenues in 2008 due primarily, according Onex’s annual report, to lower call volumes as existing clients curtailed new product launches and promotional offers but partially offset by volumes from new clients.
Sitel’s revenues: US$1.7 billion in revenues included an additional month of operations related to merger that brought in US$95 million. The income exceeded cost of sales, which amounted to US$1.1 billion, with a similar decline related to the added month of revenues. Cost of sales as a percentage of revenue was 65 percent for both 2008 and 2007. Revenue, cost of sales, and the ratio between them remained unchanged from 2007.
Today Sitel has some 67,000 agents in 155+ facilities, and in their homes. It has operations in 27 countries and serves clients’ customers and prospects in 36 languages.
To get a sense of where Sitel has been and where it is going here is a Q&A Customer Interaction Solutions magazine had with Andrew Kokes, Sitel's Vice President of Marketing:
CIS: Please outline the benefits of the Sitel/ClientLogic merger to customers
Sitel:
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Expanded global coverage
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Increased focus on thought leadership by industry leading relationship manager
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Enhanced global continuity demonstrated in operational performance
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Performance improvement driven by the aggregation of best practices developed serving more than 440 clients globally
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Leading edge technology enablement
CIS: What have been the results of the Sitel/ClientLogic merger and how do they compare with the expectations? How many of these benefits have been realized? What have you achieved and accomplished and what still has yet to be done?
Sitel: Two of the most important elements during the merger process were to ensure our clients continued to receive excellent service and that our associates were aligned and engaged. From that perspective, we succeeded very well. We added several new clients worldwide, renewed multi-year contracts with many existing clients, and expanded relationships with others. Since both companies provided complementary services and had a very complementary footprint, we were able to align those aspects expeditiously.
CIS: Explain how Sitel integrated both firms’ operations. What were the key challenges and how were they overcome. Are there any lingering issues and if so what are they and what is your game plan for dealing with them?
Sitel: Sitel’s plan for integration was clear and decisive. Sitel has integrated 100 percent of global operating locations under the Sitel Global Operating System (GOS). Sitel’s GOS is based on the principals of widely recognized quality and security standards. The integration was not free from challenges associated with our scale, global distribution or organizational structures. However, because integration expedience was made a top priority from the top down, today’s Sitel is clearly one organization leading the contact center industry. In fact, several new clients have specifically selected Sitel for its consistency and standards across multiple sites spread around the globe.
CIS: How has the economic downturn impacted Sitel, including on your forecasts and plans? What changes have you made in response to the conditions?
Sitel: The impacts of the current economic environment have presented both an opportunity and a challenge. The positive impact has materialized as large new outsourcing initiatives that have been typically associated with consolidations, asset reallocations and re-badged employees. Due to this we expect to see several new companies join our roster of clients. The down side is realized primarily through the erosion of forecasted volumes. Our volume decreases are a direct reflection of dampening in new customer sales, activations, reservations, claims, product releases and account opens.
Sitel has developed very specific service offerings to address the needs of companies during these challenging economic times. One such new service is a packaged offering targeted at low balance collections – this solution is optimized to profitably collect early in the process using a unique blend of interactive voice, live agents and non-agent assisted collections strategies.
CIS: There is a switch to self-service including with speech recognition for inbound and outbound, and away from live agents, and with Convergys (
News -
Alert) owning Intervoice the competition is increasing in this space. Discuss. What is Sitel's response?
Sitel: Self-service options are an ongoing evolution where improved enablement meets growing demand for cost optimized service options. Sitel’s approach to technology, including automation channel technology, has always been to remain flexible and scalable. We have not invested wholly into a single strategy or platform. Sitel has branded our own proprietary strategy as Sitel Interactive that includes best of breed technology platforms and delivery experts. Sitel’s approach prizes diversity and allows for maximum innovation free from the constraints of a single platform solution.
CIS: Outline Sitel's move into the home agent marketplace. Where is the demand coming from: clients that would have otherwise gone offshore or nearshore or used conventional domestic centers? Do you foresee replacing traditional facilities with home agents and if so, why, and if not, why not?
Sitel: Sitel HomeShore is a unique and proprietary approach to providing work-at-home agents to supplement and complement center based operations. We do not view Sitel HomeShore as a replacement for Offshore or other forms of sourcing, rather as a complementary addition to a well rounded and diversified contact center strategy. Home-based agents offer increased flexibility and access to specialized skill sets. Adding home-based agents to the overall enterprise agent mix improves total cost to service customers by improving overall enterprise operating efficiency. Sitel’s HomeShore operations are unique in that every home-based operation has a direct center-based counterpart from which to learn and benchmark results.
CIS: What is the future of Sitel's nearshore and offshore operations in the face of the economic downturn, pressure to keep jobs in the U.S., end-customer resistance to service from offshore agents, rising costs overseas, and drops in the Canadian dollar?
Sitel: Offshore and nearshore remain a fundamentally strong aspect of the Sitel strategy and will continue to be a significant part of our globally diversified portfolio so long as customer demand remains high. In 2008 more than 80 percent of capital invested into site expansion was invested into offshore or nearshore locations.
Sitel has seen no reduction in client or end-user interest in non-domestic locations due to the economic environment or rhetoric around U.S. based jobs. That said, Sitel is bullish about opportunities to maintain our domestic footprint at the same time we offer many global options. Given our diversified vertical focus, many of our end-users and prospective customers prefer a local or regional domestic solution to service their client base.
CIS: What does the future pose for Sitel? What will Sitel look like a year from now and what differences if any will there be from today?
Sitel: Sitel is excited about the future. We believe we will be a significant part of our clients’ successful navigation of the current economic environment. Emerging from 2009 we expect we will have several new client case examples that point to the benefits of outsourcing to capitalize captive contact center assets, migrating resources from captive payrolls and consolidating volumes to top performing outsourced partners.
Brendan B. Read is TMCnet’s Senior Contributing Editor. To read more of Brendan’s articles, please visit his columnist page.Edited by
Tim Gray
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