Portrait Chey Garland - Callcenter-Profi

coverstory
Portrait
Chey
Garland
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01/2007

coverstory
Before speaking with Chey Garland, it is easy to be slightly intimidated by this
woman’s credentials. Achieving the Veuve Cliquot ‘Business Woman of the Year’
in 2005, raising a young family and having a busy home life, and most recently
awarded a CBE in this year’s Queen’s Birthday Honours List 2007, she seems to
be a pretty formidable character. However, what is the reality behind a woman
who left school at 16 with no qualifications and became the Founder and Chief
Executive of the North East of England’s largest call centre employer with a turnover
estimated at £50 million per year.
Ms Garland (50) started her
working life as an office junior,
making tea and coffee,
ordering sandwiches and doing general
administrative tasks. At the age
of 23, she took her £600 savings and
started up a credit collections agency.
She then moved on to develop an office
block in Middlesbrough town
centre before winning a crucial contract
to handle overflow customer
service calls - this in turn led to the
birth of Garlands’ Call Centres.
With purpose built premises in Hartlepool
Marina, Garlands’ is a leading
provider of outsourced customer contact
services via all platforms including
phone, email and Web interactions.
The company currently has around
4,400 seats in all of their centres including
further sites in Middlesbrough
town centre, four at Garlands’ Contact
Centre Village in Stockton, and most
recently, the new 800 seat contact centre
in South Shields, South Tyneside on
a prestigious waterfront development.
The new centre includes state-of-theart
voice and data technologies, advanced
training facilities, and cafe
and rest areas serving hot and cold
food. Music from Garlands’ in-house
radio station, Radio Ga-Ga, also features
throughout the facility.
One of the UK´s leading poviders
of outsourced centres
Ms Garland is clear about why she
has chosen to expand further in the
North East of England. “We very
carefully considered a number of locations
and opted for South Shields
because of the quality of the local
workforce, the fantastic location, and
our commitment to grow within the
local area,” she says.
Garlands’ services range from customer
retention to cross selling, customer
service, customer acquisition,
back office, credit management and
customer lifecycle management.
“Our results show that leading-edge
technology plus good old-fashioned
people management is a formula that
works. We’re now one of the UK’s
leading providers of outsourced customer
contact services with nearly
3500 people handling 3 million inbound
and outbound calls a month
for clients including Virgin Media, Vodafone,
easyJet and Virgin Mobile,”
she says.
Investment in advanced
technology
In addition, Garlands’ places a heavy
emphasis on embracing all the new
technology the sector has to offer, recently
winning the ‘Orange Best Use
of Technology in Business’ in the
Northern Region.
This was the result of their £3 million
investment in an advanced IP infrastructure
and IP contact centre. This
enabled the company to centralise its
operations, reduce the technology
‘footprint’ whilst cutting the cost of
technology-enabling new customer
advisors by 50%, leading to an overall
reduction in IT operating costs by
25%. Garlands’ will now go on to
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compete for the National Business
Awards programme being held in
London in November. With the move
away from heavy industry and manufacturing
the North East of England,
the region seems to have embraced
the call centre sector with open arms.
Over 53,000 people are currently employed
in the sector, which equates
to almost 5% of the working population
and is forecast to grow to
around 14% by 2008.
Create a good customer
experience
“There have been significant and
positive changes in the way customer
service is measured. People
used to regard good customer service
as hitting call handling and grade of
service targets plus other metrics.
Now organisations are just as concerned
about delivering good customer
experiences and resolving as
many queries as possible on first
call,” says Chey. “There have also
been huge advances in the way organisations
go about promoting good
practice. It’s no longer just about ‘being
pleasant’. It’s about giving accurate
answers, educating Advisors
about the value of processes and encouraging
them to speak up when
processes aren’t working.
It’s also about using technology
proactively to support Advisors and
improve interactions – and recognising
the value in skills training and
people development.”
“It’s not just about listening to what
customers’ say any longer; there’s a
growing recognition that it can be
There have also been huge advances in the way
organisations go about promoting good
practice. It’s no longer just about being pleasant.
just as important to understand what
customers are feeling when they’re
not talking!” An industry as dynamic
as this does not stand around and
when asked how she sees the industry
changing in say ten year’s time,
Ms Garland notes the importance of
the human aspect of customer service.
“I believe there’ll be mor e investment
in clever software that analyses
interactions. For example, that analyses
what people are feeling as well
as what they are saying. Video interactions
will also play a bigger role.
These developments will all deliver a
more well rounded and personalised
service to customers, with Contact
Centres moving from being perceived
as unnecessary ‘cost centres’ to vital
‘profit centres’ for businesses.
“Customer service will also be more
distributed. More organisations will
operate on a virtual basis with their
contact centres distributed across
multiple sites. There’ll be more use
of mobile knowledge workers and
more home workers. And I believe
that the technology and processes
that enable distributed working will
be more mature and more accessible
to a broader range of organisations.”
But surely the biggest issue facing the
industry today is the reputation of the
sector itself and the attraction and
retention of good quality advisors
who enjoy their role and are recognised
for their contribution.
“We entered the market at a time
when call centres were attracting a lot
of negative publicity. There was talk
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The new 800 seat contact centre in South
Shields, South Tyneside on a prestigious
waterfront development.
of ‘sweatshops’ and workers labouring
under strip lights in sterile warehouse-like
offices. I resolved that we’d
be very different,” says Chey. “Our call
centres - and today we have five separate
state-of-the-art centres - provide
light, airy working environments that
we’ve designed to foster teamwork
and make people feel ‘visible’. The
emphasis is firmly on training and
enabling our people, with our people
development programmes even extending
into the local community.”
“Is this a case of fluffy idealism taking
over from cool-headed commercial
reality I don’t believe so. More and
more companies now see their call
centres as the engine rooms of good
customer service. After all, that’s
where most customer contacts take
place. More than providing information,
call centres can cement customer
relationships and foster loyalty.
Our advisers are at the sharp end,
where it really matters – and clearly
you need skilled, motivated people if
you are to deliver great service.”
So what advice would Chey give to
budding entrepreneurs in the industry
who are determined to achieve
even a small part of the success she
has had. “If you want the secret to
my success it has to be this: show
your people that you value them, develop
them as well-rounded individuals,
and give them the tools that enable
them to make a difference. If
you do that, it’s amazing how often
they’ll want to go that extra mile for
you too.” Chey also adds “also remember
on your journey to; work
hard, have fun, and do some good
along the way too!” n
Tracy Simpson
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