5 minute read
New Opportunities
Philip Cochrane, Vice President of Delivery for Northern Ireland at Teleperformance, tells Emma Deighan how the company’s adoption of new technology during the pandemic has enabled the firm’s two large-scale call centres here to work from home while exposing it to a whole new talent pool.
At most, 25% of Teleperformance’s NI staff are based within the office at any one time since the government eased lockdown rules. There are around 2,000 in the NI team. It’s a setup that is both client and pandemic-led but also one that has been made possible by the fast adoption of new technology during the first lockdown in 2020. The company’s integration of its own software, Cloud Campus, has been at the core of the huge logistical task that was shifting the bulk of its team to home working. It’s a technology that the company describes as its “most efficient and effective model for hiring, training, and managing remote teams while ensuring exceptional, consistent customer experiences”. It means users can be based anywhere but maintain connections with supervisors and colleagues via the Cloud Campus Hub. The technology has also revolutionised how Teleperformance reaches new talent, thanks to its ability to break down geographical barriers.
“We are working on a project right now that allows us to move to Cloud Campus full time,” Philip begins. “A lot depends on the client, their needs and the statistics of how everything performs – both our people and the technology.” Philip was previously based in Manchester, travelling around GB prior to the pandemic, but in June 2020 he returned home to oversee the company’s Bangor and Newry bases.
“It was a huge piece of work – to move up to 14,000 UK staff to home working back in April 2020,” he recalls. “There were multiple cogs turning, multiple departments working together and it was a lot to ask of everyone. The business completely changed overnight.” Teleperfomance is a global firm, servicing 170 countries with customer service resources to back office teams, accounting services, collections and a proportion of sales for a multitude of high profile clients. In Northern Ireland this includes sensitive public sector organisations to well-known commercial businesses. Philip says out of its 70 customers within the UK, “one or two must be done from the office due to the sensitive nature of work”. Growth has been constant across all but one of the company’s customer bases, he adds. “We’ve seen nearly all of our sectors grow with the exception of the holiday market. Travel stopped completely. The growth in other areas did put a lot of strain
on recruitment because we needed to find all these people while completely changing our traditional recruitment strategy,” he continues. With that challenge came opportunity, he adds. “Now you can work from anywhere in the UK for Teleperformance; it brings advantages and it widens the pool, so we set about sourcing new people, strategising our reach to these people.
“We identified places like Wales where we didn’t have a call centre before and went there to advertise. The same happened in London, which was a massive untapped resource for us. The population there is massive and being able to work from home has enabled us to recruit there. “It’s changed how we work completely. It’s exciting to get different cultures together.” Asked if the new shift in where its teams can work will determine the physical presence Teleperformance has in NI, Philip says not in the immediate future.
“We have a couple of premises coming towards their renewal date in the UK, but the way we see it is we always wanted a presence in Northern Ireland. We have two sites here and both are in very good locations. Would we close one? Potentially, but only if all the clients that use that centre agree to move to Cloud Campus to allow everyone to work from home permanently.
“We see Cloud Campus as being able to help people to do their job from home and the logical conclusion would be that we wouldn’t need two sites in the same city, but to my knowledge we are not looking to close anywhere.” As the company grows, which it has in Northern Ireland, gaining an extra 500 team members throughout the pandemic, the methods the company uses to recruit individuals has also changed, says Philip, with technology also key to the process.
“The way we recruit now is moving towards being fully automated and it works because the market tells us a lot of younger people, which make up a good portion of the people we recruit, don’t have CVs, so we ask is a CV even required? It’s not really. So what we do now are tests virtually on PC or mobile device, automated tests. That might be a grammar or knowledge test and towards the end of the process we can do a more in-depth analysis of the candidate. That automation frees up time and it also helps the interviewee. A lot of people don’t perform their best in an interview process because of anxiety or mental health problems, so if someone is able to do the bulk of the application on their own, they find it easier to come on board.” More growth is on the cards too and when the travel sector recovers, Philip anticipates a demand in outsourcing customer services. He says: “We always look at growth and we always want to look at what new sectors are coming out there and who wants to work with us. We have an amazing brand globally and we’re in contact with potential contracts with a number of new ones in the pipeline. “More expansion is on the cards for 2022 and that will bring opportunity. I also expect the holiday industry to come back and in the next year or so we could be looking at an explosion of growth in that area. “We want to be there and ready to work in partnership with clients, and the more we innovate and the more ideas we have, the more we can show them that we can give them a better service; from enhancing their website or product to helping provide that full customer service experience.”
