Lead
Sustained growth
Contact center traces success to a system of attracting skilled workers and maximizing their productivity while improving service quality
By Dave Llorito
At ePerformax Contact Centers, the number of employees working is a constantly changing statistic. That’s because just to cope with its fast-growing volume of business, the company absorbs about a hundred new hires every week. This is in addition to the work force of 2,500 that its Makati and Cebu operations already had early this year.
The secret to successfully managing such big numbers of hires, says Teresa Hartsaw, ePerformax president and chief executive officer, is the performance maximization model that she had designed based on the principles of “Six Sigma.” That model has enabled the company to attract skilled workers and maximize their productivity while constantly improving service quality.
Originally developed by Motorola in 1986, Six Sigma is a set of management practices that incorporates the principles and lessons from the six decades of evolution of quality improvement methodologies. Those methodologies include quality control, total quality management (TQM), and zero product defects.
Hartsaw explains: “Six Sigma is really very simple. If you have to produce a product that will satisfy the customer, it has to have zero defects. For instance, if you use the ATM to get cash, you expect to get the right cash every time. That’s the whole concept.”
A partnership between the Filipino-owned Transnational Diversified Group (TDG) and the US-based Performance Consulting Group (PCG), ePerformax provides business solutions to various Fortune 500 companies that are mostly based in the United States. Its services to these companies include inbound and e-mail customer service, technical support, data collection and verification, and back office processing.
Hartsaw says that for a manager to achieve zero defects in a business process, he or she should effectively address its uncontrollable variable. In call center operations, she says, that uncontrollable variable is the person—the staff who is interacting with the clients or customers.
She elaborates on the Six Sigma concept: “How do you control the person who is interacting with the client like you control the machine? There are many concepts of Six Sigma that can apply to managing people. What we did was to take the best concepts of that model and we applied them to what we call a performance-maximization approach to running the business. That model has been extremely successful for us.”
But she admits she had to do some tweaking of that model to make it work in the Philippine context. In the US, she says, Americans are direct in their communications, but it is a directness that is not common among Filipinos. She explains: “Filipino call-center staff at the receiving end of such directness might feel intimidated and might become very quiet. They might feel that such directness is too confrontational. So we have to work on how to train our call-center staff so they wouldn’t feel those things, so they wouldn’t feel that the people at the other end of the line are confrontational.”
Hartsaw says that the ePerformax performance-maximization model worked right away in the company’s call centers and has been largely responsible for the company’s rapid growth in only five years. “When I told people that the Philippine call center operations would outperform even those of the US, they didn’t believe me,” she says. “They would tell me that there was no way for a culture that doesn’t understand the American people—in short, for call-center people who are raised in the Philippines—to ever be able to provide that service that the Americans want. But they were proven wrong.”
Contact Details:
ePERFORMAX CONTACT CENTERS
Teresa D. Hartsaw, President and Chief Operation Officer
2nd Floor, BPI Buendia Center
Senator Gil Puyat Avenue
Makati City, Philippines
Telephone: (02) 490-2288 ext. 6715
Fax: (02) 490-2222
Website: www.eperformax.com
The secret to successfully managing such big numbers of hires, says Teresa Hartsaw, ePerformax president and chief executive officer, is the performance maximization model that she had designed based on the principles of “Six Sigma.” That model has enabled the company to attract skilled workers and maximize their productivity while constantly improving service quality.
Originally developed by Motorola in 1986, Six Sigma is a set of management practices that incorporates the principles and lessons from the six decades of evolution of quality improvement methodologies. Those methodologies include quality control, total quality management (TQM), and zero product defects.
Hartsaw explains: “Six Sigma is really very simple. If you have to produce a product that will satisfy the customer, it has to have zero defects. For instance, if you use the ATM to get cash, you expect to get the right cash every time. That’s the whole concept.”
A partnership between the Filipino-owned Transnational Diversified Group (TDG) and the US-based Performance Consulting Group (PCG), ePerformax provides business solutions to various Fortune 500 companies that are mostly based in the United States. Its services to these companies include inbound and e-mail customer service, technical support, data collection and verification, and back office processing.
Hartsaw says that for a manager to achieve zero defects in a business process, he or she should effectively address its uncontrollable variable. In call center operations, she says, that uncontrollable variable is the person—the staff who is interacting with the clients or customers.
She elaborates on the Six Sigma concept: “How do you control the person who is interacting with the client like you control the machine? There are many concepts of Six Sigma that can apply to managing people. What we did was to take the best concepts of that model and we applied them to what we call a performance-maximization approach to running the business. That model has been extremely successful for us.”
But she admits she had to do some tweaking of that model to make it work in the Philippine context. In the US, she says, Americans are direct in their communications, but it is a directness that is not common among Filipinos. She explains: “Filipino call-center staff at the receiving end of such directness might feel intimidated and might become very quiet. They might feel that such directness is too confrontational. So we have to work on how to train our call-center staff so they wouldn’t feel those things, so they wouldn’t feel that the people at the other end of the line are confrontational.”
Hartsaw says that the ePerformax performance-maximization model worked right away in the company’s call centers and has been largely responsible for the company’s rapid growth in only five years. “When I told people that the Philippine call center operations would outperform even those of the US, they didn’t believe me,” she says. “They would tell me that there was no way for a culture that doesn’t understand the American people—in short, for call-center people who are raised in the Philippines—to ever be able to provide that service that the Americans want. But they were proven wrong.”
Contact Details:
ePERFORMAX CONTACT CENTERS
Teresa D. Hartsaw, President and Chief Operation Officer
2nd Floor, BPI Buendia Center
Senator Gil Puyat Avenue
Makati City, Philippines
Telephone: (02) 490-2288 ext. 6715
Fax: (02) 490-2222
Website: www.eperformax.com
