An Interview with Paul Sweeny, CEO, Vertex
In this interview for the International Business and Languages Review, Paul Sweeny, Chief Executive Officer of Vertex, the award-winning Business Process Outsourcing company, discusses best practices for dealing with an international, multi-lingual, cross-cultural client base.
IBLR: Paul, can I start by asking you to give me a brief introduction to who you are and what you do at Vertex.
PS: I’m the CEO, I’ve been at Vertex since 2009, just coming up to a year and a half. Prior to that I was seventeen years with IBM, in various executive positions around the world, mainly in their services business, either in outsourcing IT or outsourcing of business process-type management activities, so I’ve spent a lot of time in the outsourcing industry.
When I came to Vertex, the board basically hired me to drive the growth of the company. We’re private equity-owned, we bought the business from United Utilities about three & a half years ago and we’ve done a pretty good job of improving delivery quality and customer satisfaction.
Vertex is a multi-channel customer management outsourcing company. Probably somewhat less than 50% of our business is what you would recognise as “call-centre”, the other 50% is made up of multi-channel customer contact and e-commerce environments.
The utility industry is one of our big specializations, where we have large-scale IT capabilities including customer management and billing systems. We also have a significant presence in the public sector in the UK with both central and local government where we primarily deliver contact centre and back office BPO. In the financial services sector we operate primarily in the mortgage area delivering back and front office work for a number of large banks and financial institutions.
You might have read one of our more recent announcement where we’re doing the back office administration and front office contact for Tesco Bank, as they go into the marketplace in the next several months. And we have a fairly healthy private sector business in the UK which includes retail clients such as Marks & Spencer and Selfridges, logistics businesses including Home Delivery Network and some other interesting clients like William Hill, the betting organization and Cable and Wireless, where we provide a large proportion of their customer contact.
We also have international businesses – one of them in Australia, very focused on the telecom market as well as finance, North America (Canada and the US) where we are the largest provider of customer management services to the utilities sector – and India. There are two aspects to what we do in India, we have a business that provides support for our international operations and we have a business that supports international clients, so call centre, back office, etc. It’s mainly non-voice, given the markets we serve where our clients prefer to deal onshore for the most part with their customer care.
We recently acquired a joint venture position in an Indian domestic-focused company called Shell Transource, which added about 5,000 people to our capability in India, and that’s very much focused on the domestic marketplace, which is growing at 40% to 50% a year in the BPO space.
IBLR: Vertex has won various awards for outstanding customer service in BPO. To what extent do you think understanding the business cultures of the countries where you do business is a factor in customer service excellence?
PS: It is fundamental. But it’s not just the business cultures. We communicate with our clients’ customers on their behalf so we strive to ensure that we understand and reflect any local subtleties.
The customers we engage with want a rewarding experience from their retailer, utility company or local authority and at Vertex we work hard to remove any barriers to this experience, which means ensuring that our agents are able to connect and empathise with the people that they are talking with.
The first thing to recognise is that we’re a B2B business, so our role in life is, in some shape or form, to help our clients look after their customer base. So we tend to take on the brand identity of the client that we’re dealing with. When we answer the phone, it is never as “Vertex”, it is as “Tesco Bank” or “Marks & Spencers” or “South West Gas” in Atlanta, Georgia for example.
We take our guidance as it relates to how the client wants us to deal with their customer, whether it be a sales issue or a customer service issue we’re trying to deal with, and we try and apply the technologies, the tools and the methodologies we have to give superior service to their customer base.
IBLR: Can you provide some examples of how that works in practice?
One example would be in the Southern US, a good portion of many of our utilities clients’ customers are of South American heritage, so Spanish language skills are a minimum, but also an understanding of some of the cultural differences and how those people go about paying their bills. There are certain differences between the Western cultural aspect of dealing with things like bad debt versus the Latin American culture, which is different from country to country but has certainly got some commonality.
Another example would be Australia, where we run a huge part of one of the largest telecom companies’ marketing & sales organization, so its more of a sales/outbound view of the world, trying to market products and services and packages to their customer base. In that particular aspect, a good portion of the customer is of Asian/Pacific heritage, Chinese Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, etc. It’s not just having the language skills to deal with such a diverse customer base, it’s having an awareness of the cultural differences between them and how they react to sales campaigns, what works and what doesn’t.
I would hesitate to call it a science, but it comes down to some really good understanding of cultural differences between the various ethnic groups in the countries that we’re doing business with, and its all about either managing in a way that they would recognise and feel good about, versus trying to use Western ways too much, which would in some cases be offensive to them and in other cases you just don’t get the right results.
IBLR: Vertex employs 15,000 people across four continents. How do you manage the issues of communication, language and culture across your many internal divisions and departments, especially right down to the operational and technical level? Are all of those 15,000 staff required to speak English for example?
PS: Our senior team is drawn from a wide number of countries and cultures, however the company communicates in English as the majority of our operations are based in English-speaking countries. We ensure that people have the opportunity to learn from colleagues in other countries through site visits, placements etc.
So although Vertex is a predominantly English-speaking organisation, we clearly identify the needs and opportunities for local language support where appropriate and the easiest way for us to get cultural awareness and language skills is to recruit people who have that heritage.
IBLR: What about your call centers here in the UK? Given the increasingly diverse language mix of people calling utilities/councils etc, how do you meet the language challenges that exist here?
PS: We have capabilities in the UK for a number of languages such as Hindi and Cantonese and we supplement these where appropriate for specific clients.
In our Glasgow facility for example, we deal a lot (believe it or not) with classic European languages like French, German and Dutch, so because the customer base that we’re serving in the UK has got that diversity to it, you tend not to be hiring people who’ve got that ethnicity, but you tend to be looking for people who’ve got multi-lingual skills, people who speak two or three, in some cases four languages. Places like Glasgow and Manchester have a demographic where you can pick up that type of talent.
IBLR: And do you make use of any kind of language service providers or translation service providers?
PS: Some. If you look at New York City as an example, where we’ve got dozens of different heritages speaking dozens of different languages, we have the capability of things like delivering a bill in a customer’s own language. But that bill is not only a demand for payment, it’s also a communication vehicle as it relates to other issues such as energy usage.
We tend to get clients where we have to think more multi-culturally in how they reach out to their customer base, and we use translation services in many cases to help us with campaigns around the sales or bill communications.
IBLR: What about for telephone communication?
PS: Well, you would staff according to the client demographic. In these situations you can never get 100% coverage of all the different languages. In a place like New York or Toronto it’s just impossible. So instead you focus on what gets you 80% of the way there. So you try and deal with the 80/20 rule and look for the common denominator.
We do have very sophisticated technologies in place that support our agents when they’re talking with customers but it ultimately comes down to hiring people who are culturally like your clients. If you get this right, the customer has an improved experience.
IBLR: Can you tell us a little more about your technology initiatives? Particularly around improving and developing the efficiency of these communications in the future?
PS: Multichannel strategies are vitally important in providing customers with a seamless experience. This means ensuring that we help customers contact and interact with organisations via voice, web and text. It’s clearly critical that the language offer is replicated across these channels otherwise a Cantonese conversation might be followed up by an English text message, completely undermining the efficacy of the multi-language strategy
The key to this is the ability to understand and segment customers so that a tailored response can be developed. Data analytics and decision sciences can help here, identifying discreet groups from within a larger customer cohort for example
IBLR: In conclusion, are there any words of advice you would offer to firms who are doing business internationally and having to deal with cross-cultural and linguistic challenges?
PS: I can probably offer a couple. First, don’t think about this as a cost, think about it as an investment. At the end of the day, the more you can tailor your message to the demographics of the customer base that you’re trying to deal with, the more successful you’ll be, either in the customer service aspects of trying to drive quality of service up or in the sales aspects of trying to get more bang for your buck in your marketing and sales campaigns. If you’ve got a large proportion of non-Western populace in your customer base, then you’ve got to take it seriously or else they’ll go somewhere else.
The second thing I would say is it’s very interesting to me to see how young people around the world, as they become customers of some of our clients, react very differently to different methods of communication. So an example would be if you send something to a person of Japanese heritage residing in Melbourne by mail, you would have a certain response and return rate for that mail. But if the demographic was 18-30 year olds and you did it through text messaging, you would have a far higher response rate. And sending text messages in their native language, you’ll get an even higher response than if you send that text message in English.
So it’s all about how you reach out and understand that different demographics behave differently. As these kids grow up, because they never pick up the phone, they’d much rather text each other and use the various tools that are out there like Facebook, instant messaging and so on. Harnessing that in a marketing campaign focused on those young people, like trying to sell cellphones or ipods or whatever it may be, if you don’t get that right then they’ll go elsewhere.
IBLR: Thank you Paul
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