Jan 04 - Quality will help retain jobs

In a bullish statement to his workforce, Harry Hogg, Commercial Director of TSC, emphasised the company had the skills and expertise to offer a level of service that could not be matched by overseas competitors.

Although there have been a number of press reports that UK call centres jobs have been lost to the Indian sub-continent, Harry is convinced that many of them have been linked to back office processing work.

"TSC's commitment is to bringing high quality sustainable contact centre jobs to people in rural and semi rural areas of Scotland," said Harry. "This has been and will remain one of TSC's core objectives. There is without doubt a shift of jobs overseas but the rate of high quality "customer facing" contact centre jobs that are being lost to overseas competitors is probably overstated.

"I think the offshore organisations will be able to offer some services to UK companies but in the main for low value transaction work. This is not the kind of work we want to attract to our contact centres. We set out to deliver high quality sophisticated end-to-end services through employing and developing high quality people. It's simply a different proposition which can't easily be replicated in say India for example.

"We firmly believe that the high value nature of the call centre services we provide would be difficult to achieve for most of the offshore providers.

“If you consider what has happened in the USA, only 5-10% of offshore work actually involves call centre agents involved in high value customer facing roles. I think the lesson for everyone is to invest in people to such a degree that the skills and local knowledge just can't be replicated overseas.

“If the contact centre industry focuses on quality, the UK will always benefit from the higher value services and therefore higher value jobs being retained on-shore ".

Having won a major contract to provide customer services to a major UK financial institution, TSC brought in over 200 contact centre jobs to its Aviemore Based Contact Centre more than a year ago.

These contact centre positions represent high quality jobs for the community. A number of the agents at TSC Aviemore are already studying towards The Chartered Institute of Bankers in Scotland - Telephone Banking Certificate which offers the call centre and agents the opportunity to develop their skills and marketability within the call centre and financial services industries. TSC are keen that more people in the local community come and speak to them about employment in their contact centre and high quality part time staff are particularly required.

Source: The Strathspey and Badenoch Herald