01 January 2008:
SITEL
"You can tell a business by the companies it keeps’ is something of a maxim here at esl."
esl is particularly proud of its work for Sitel, leading global providers of outsourced customer support services and a client for more than five years. For a company of such repute to outsource its own payroll to a supplier such as esl is a real feather in our cap.
Sitel works with many of the world’s leading organizations in the automotive, consumer, financial services, insurance, technology, telecommunications and utility industries, helping them find, acquire, and retain customers to enhance the value of these relationships throughout the customer lifecycle.
The company manages some two million customer contacts a day via telephone, e-mail, Internet, traditional mail, and other media. Nearly 32,000 Sitel employees operate from more than 23,000 workstations in 88 contact centres located in 24 countries, providing services in more than 25 languages and dialects.
Outsourcing explosion
What Sitel’s clients share is a common desire to innovate, to find ways to grow their business and optimise the value of customer relationships through cost-effective, higher quality sales and service, world class processes and improved customer satisfaction. They also require the flexibility to scale their operation to handle unexpected or sporadic volume, based upon seasonality or product/service release cycles, a major contributing factor in the explosive growth of outsourcing in the call centre sector.
In the UK, where Sitel has been in business since 1997, the company operates from four distinct business units - Kingston upon Thames, Newcastle upon Tyne, Stratford upon Avon and Watford employing 2,500 staff, around half of whom are weekly-paid.
When Sitel was seeking a new payroll provider in 2000, the immediate priority was to provide resourcing to stabilise the in-house department. esl was able to provide specialist staff to work at the Watford office to run the payroll, while documenting the various procedures that Sitel utilised in readiness for managing a fully outsourced payroll.
Time to discover
Following this ‘discovery period’, esl knew exactly what was required to manage the payroll from the outset. And since Sitel had a time and attendance system in place, work was undertaken to ensure that a file was generated each week in a format that was compatible with esl’s payroll system.
By ensuring that the variable data input was automated, the next challenge was the ‘fixed’ data, or employee records, which were only available in hard copy and so had to be manually keyed by the esl team. The opportunity arose when Sitel implemented Oracle throughout its offices, with esl technical consultant Jeremy Toms working with the Sitel technical team to ensure that a file could be imported directly from Oracle.
A true partnership
Today, managed services team leader Heidi Gerchen and her colleagues at esl have a strong working relationship with Sitel. Apart from the regular payroll routines, the team liaises with HR managers in each call centre, helping deal with staff queries. Her Majesty Revenue and Customs correspondence comes direct to esl for action and regular meetings are held to ensure that all is on track and to check on new developments at Sitel.
As Sitel sees it: “esl is always extremely supportive and we can count on Heidi and the team for being part of the solution and never the problem.”