Becogent, the five-year-old home-grown company which was last year’s fastest-growing Scottish business, confirmed that call centre jobs can be created in Scotland as well as India or South Africa.
The announcement that 600 jobs at Erskine are to be added to the 1300 created by Becogent, from Airdrie, follows the opening last month of a 200-job centre in Bath Street, Glasgow, by the 10-year-old Telecom Service Centres, which launched in Rothesay and now employs 1900.
Like TSC, Becogent is competing head-to-head with centres in the Asian sub-continent for major UK and multi-national clients at a time when clients and their customers are becoming more demanding, and more critical of impersonal call centre service.With technology partner Gensys, Becogent has developed a hybrid system called Beassisted which enables the caller to switch immediately to ‘live agent support’.
The company said: We have merged two pieces of technology which are in use all over the place this is the future of call centres. If you don’t continue to innovate and invent, you lose out to India”. It means Becogent can handle more complex types of customer contact at the same time as using automation to reduce typical UK costs by around 30%.
Becogent’s latest expansion over three years bears out the view of Ken Hills, chief executive of TSC, that ‘if contact centre companies have the technological and people skills, they can offer a viable alternative to the overseas operations ‘.
Hills has observed that only 15% of the UK’s call centre work is outsourced, at home or overseas, so there must be ‘huge scope for growth’. Determined training means Becogent is also gaining a reputation for successful telemarketing that out-of-the-blue tea-time call that you do not expect, to sell you something you did not know you needed which is building towards a third of its business.
The Erskine centre, in the old Automobile Association building, will be Becogent’s third satellite centre. ‘The hardware all remains at Airdrie, and everything is routed down the line. All you need is PCs and routers,’ said a company source. ‘There used to be a threshold of a $2m investment to start up a centre. That’s no longer the case.’
Becogent will, however, be investing £2.5m over the next year, after a 25% jump in turnover to £17m and a more than doubling of profits to £1m last year, with a further 50% rise expected this year.
Ron Peerenboom, the company’s founder , believes that the UK industry will be forced to move away from high-volume, low value business as it becomes automated or continues to move offshore. Around 1.1 million call centre jobs are set to be created by British firms abroad by 2008.
Source: Glasgow Herald
2004-09-17
Em Foco – Pessoa