David Beausang , Head of Business Development with FEXCO refers to the announcement by Bord Gáis of a new customer service outsourcing partnership with FEXCO delivering customer service to over 600,000 existing Bord Gáis customers. The contract exemplifies its commitment to outsourcing as a key procurement strategy, which is described in detail by Padraig Twomey, Group Procurement Manager of Bord Gáis, in this issue’s cover story.

Bord Gáis made the decision some years ago to outsource its customer service helpline. The supplier contract was extended and, after a second extension, Bord Gáis put it out to tender in what became a major public procurement competition. Initially, Bord Gáis interviewed at least sixteen Irish and international organisations. At the end, FEXCO was successful.

"We were given a tight deadline," recalls Beausang. "The Bord Gáis Call Centre was fully operational within twelve weeks of winning the contract. The deadlines were set early in the process and there were a lot of drivers affecting the urgency to complete things in time for market announcements and new initiatives. We fitted out one of our facilities dedicated to Bord Gáis so that, to all intents, it had all the ambience of a Bord Gáis office based in Kerry. We were awarded Preferred Vendor status by Bord Gáis on the 26^th September 2007 and started taking calls on January 9th 2008."

FEXCO is providing three areas of service for Bord Gáis. One is in Energy Supply, dealing with customers who receive gas and handling everything from billing queries to being set up as a new customer. FEXCO also fully supports the entrance of Bord Gáis into the electricity market. The second area is Appliance Servicing.

For example, if a Bord Gáis customer wants to have a boiler serviced by an accredited Bord Gáis engineer, FEXCO takes the booking, arranges for the engineer’s visit and will follow up to ensure that the customer is happy with the service. The third area is business-to-business, dealing with, say, construction firms and SMEs, connecting themselves into the Bord Gáis Network. "Networks are a different dynamic than with consumers – it’s a different kind of interaction," notes Beausang. "Although our main tool is the telephone, there is a great deal of analysis undertaken in conjunction with Bord Gáis in terms of how to deal with each contact group. We are bound by service level agreements to deal with consumer calls in a certain way and it is similar for B2B."

A strategic place to be
Beausang believes that FEXCO is in a very strategic place in working with Bord Gáis to help them manage and forecast how their customers interact with the company. "Previously, it would have been very cyclical. But, as Bord Gáis rolls out new ways of providing energy to their consumers, with a big push towards renewables, there is a whole new pattern coming out, and historic performance doesn’t provide future guidance. The way people are now interacting with energy companies has changed dramatically. Dealing with customers such as those of Bord Gáis, which is an industry with a global perspective, and yet has price relevance to every domestic consumer, means that we are working with them at many levels beyond consumer responses."

Customer care rather than sales is the focus. "Outbound calls would constitute only a small part of what we do for Bord Gáis. We don’t position FEXCO an outbound sales organisation. We prefer to deal with the customer care type environment where we can offer a deeper level of expertise. For example, our front office Bord Gáis Call Centre links with the Bord Gáis back office, so that in terms of escalation, query handling, reporting and MIS, we are highly integrated with their organisation.

"We are also partnering with Bord Gáis to predict how consumers will interact with them in the future, having regard to all the types of technologies that people use to communicate with a company like Bord Gáis. It’s not always about calls. Bord Gáis has a superb website. Many companies have found that as soon as they put in web payment capabilities as well as IVR they get payments around the clock with a subsequent reduction in direct debits. We need to cater for other kinds of future developments as part of our service to Bord Gáis.

Deep concept of partnership
"We have people who are work on the Bord Gáis contract who speak as if Bord Gáis employed them. That’s how deep the concept of partnership goes. We ran an extensive local recruitment campaign that was dual branded FEXCO/Bord Gáis so that the people who joined FEXCO to operate this Call Centre have the attitude that they work for Bord Gáis and it’s nice that they do so because they are representing Bord Gáis to the customer and need to behave in a way that communicates the Bord Gáis brand to the consumer.

"This is central to how we run call centres. We don’t operate Call Centres on the basis where one can take a call for Prize Bonds one minute and Bord Gáis the next. We embed people in specific customer solutions and we train them accordingly. We train them to give a good service for the client company. And, that’s what partnership means for us – it means embedding our own people in the culture of our customers. The training campaign for Bord Gáis has been comprehensive and it’s much more than operating a keyboard or answering a phone. It’s about understanding the nature of the client."

The partnership is a close one. FEXCO executives are in Bord Gáis’s offices regularly and they have seats dedicated to their presence. Reciprocally, there is a dedicated area in FEXCO for Bord Gáis personnel, who literally have the keys to the door of the Call Centre.

FEXCO was able to accommodate the contract within one of its existing facilities, which was opened in 2003 and which had been a €4 million investment. "When Bord Gáis people toured FEXCO, they had a sense of the investment made by the company. It is a fantastic, massive modern business facility based in the southwest of Ireland. It’s for that reason that we have strong relationships with global companies such as Western Union – which doesn’t have relationships with anyone who doesn’t comply with their standards. We are currently looking at opening new facilities in Tralee."

FEXCO also manages contact centres for flagship customers such as Coca-Cola, Unilever and Diageo and jointly manages the Prize Bonds contract with An Post.

Community at its heart
The Bord Gáis contract opens yet another page in the extraordinary success story of FEXCO, the company established in 1981 by former bank executive Brian McCarthy in Killorglin on the Ring of Kerry, a town hitherto best known for its centuries-old Puck Fair. FEXCO is now one of Ireland’s best-known global companies, but its roots remain local. (See box)

"FEXCO is an organisation that has community at as a core value, We have strong links with regional employment and development and a commitment to ensure that there are people in Kerry have jobs Kerry. FEXCO comes from a community and an employment perspective and that informs how we bring customers into FEXCO. We don’t go for short term job grabbing. People seek to build their careers by working for FEXCO locally and so our retention of staff is higher than it would be if we were employing people in Dublin.

The contract represents 140 jobs in Killorglin over a five-year period, with a two-year extension and that will contribute in a big way to underpinning local employment for years to come."

Training for the Bord Gáis contract was done in Tralee and most of the workforce is drawn from the Killorglin/Tralee/Killarney area, where FEXCO currently draws 800 employees. It also has a facility in Cahirciveen, which is the business continuity location for the Bord Gáis Call Centre. In terms of unsolicited CVs, FEXCO gets a huge number. "We grow our own, so to speak, Says Beausang. "We aim to grow people who can understand the business and can operate at an executive level to a far superior view to anyone else that comes in at that level."

FEXCO uses a local HR company and Shannon Development gave a lot of support in setting up the training unit. "Our people have the diverse skills we need to handle calls from ordinary consumers. You need a good mix of people if you want to handle queries well. FEXCO has carefully monitored the way we do business and we are constantly striving for operational excellence. We work to the Six Sigma framework, which is well proven and can be summarised simply as doing things right first time. You assess what you’re doing and ask: how can we cut down on mistakes and increase quality. This is highly relevant for call centres, where the constant target is first time resolution."

He adds: "Bord Gáis is involved in building networks around the country and they are expanding to hit all areas of the country. Immediately, there is a strategic fit. They have a nationwide perspective and are not seeking a partner that is rooted only in the Dublin area."

Key role of suppliers
Purchasing through the supply chain is a critical element of FEXCO’s business, according to Beausang. "In a sense, everything else is just a grey framework of solutions and we inject colour into it by bringing in our people and our partner organisations. Our suppliers have played a key role. They are the people who will have helped us win the Bord Gáis contract and, more importantly, helped us deliver on our promises to Bord Gáis. We appreciate what they vendors like Eircom, LAN Communications, Nortel, Lenovo and Shannon Development have done.

"Our vendors have cut lead times and they made a special effort to ensure that they delivered precisely what we wanted in record time. We didn’t go out and source a lot of new vendors for this contract; we used our existing vendors with whom we have built long-term relationships It was a case of knowing what we could deliver and committing to that and assembling a good team that included our strategic partners to help us deliver, and constantly communicating with Bord Gáis to tell them where we were. It was a complete no-surprise approach.

"Bord Gáis obviously had an interest in our vendors and what their competencies were and their capabilities. We need to ensure that we give a good level of service to Bord Gáis and we are measured on that. Where we are reliant on a service being provided by a vendor, both FEXCO and Bord Gáis need to ensure that they can meet the standards required by Bord Gáis and we are very open in communicating that to our vendor chain. And that’s what has enabled us to exceed expectations. Everyone knows that projects are made up of project plans, schedules, to-do lists, pricing schedules and contracts and deadlines. What makes it exceptional are the people and the partners that deliver it. It’s their commitment to get things done, the community of people involved in delivering it and the ingenuity to come up with a unique way of doing things that saves time and money."

"There’s the sheer unbending will and momentum of people who work for FEXCO to deliver over the line. There is the obsession, maybe in a unique Kerry way, to do things in a cleverer way than was ever done before. It’s almost like, we don’t take the road most travelled because there is always another way by which it can be done differently and better. Innovation is constant. Ever present is our commitment to complete things to the highest quality. We are committed to delivering a great job and we are proud to have Bord Gáis as a customer."