Garner lays out plan

City, county officials hear it

By LISA SIMPSON STRANGE

Unemployed workers in Glasgow may have 300 new job opportunities soon.

Dave Garner, president and CEO of Sitel, told representatives of city and county government and Rotary club members Thursday that the company is “in the splash zone” for the time frame to bring a client in for the new call center facility.

He said he didn’t have an exact date, but that it would be very soon – hopefully in the next few weeks.

“I don’t know whether it’s tomorrow or three weeks,” he said.

Garner met with Mayor Darrell Pickett and members of the city council’s finance committee, as well as Barren County Judge-Executive Davie Greer and magistrates from fiscal court, Thursday morning in city council chambers. He answered questions and provided officials with information about his company.

Sitel is a large international business process outsourcing (BPO) company – not a telemarketing operation. Although a small percentage of their business deals with outgoing calls – they have three or four centers in Oklahoma and Maine with 300 to 400 people who do outbound calling – the large majority of service involves incoming calls from customers.

“We are not a telemarketing company,” he explained.

The privately owned company has $2 billion in revenues, operates in 29 countries with 154 facilities and more than 60,000 employees.

Garner said they are looking for more than one client for the facility because that model offers more stability in case one of them decides to leave at some point. He said they are talking to six different companies about using the resources of the Glasgow call center.

Sitel works typically with Fortune 1000 companies. Some of their clients include Microsoft, DirectTV, British Telecom, Toshiba, Sony, AT&T;, XM Sirius Satellite Radio, Norwegian Cruise Lines, ComCast and Cox Communications.

Employees at the facility may deal with a wide range of customer service calls. Garner said it could be something as simple as a person calling to say “I got my bill in the mail and I don’t think I owe this much” to adding channels to a TV package, helping someone installing a fax machine to troubleshoot a problem, taking a company supply order, working with someone on how to fix broken equipment or taking credit card information from a customer who is buying a business’ product.

Workers at the facility will be Sitel employees, but they will be trained to deal with a specific client’s customer service techniques. The training will range from one week to six months based on the complexity of the services they are providing for a client. All training will occur on site and at the Glasgow campus of Western Kentucky University, which is next door to the facility. He said average training time is three weeks.

Benefits for full-time employees will include health, dental and life insurance and a 401K plan.

According to Garner, the call center will have more than 500 workstations with 1.3 full-time position equivalents per seat. This is because the facility could be open from 6 a.m. until midnight and on weekends. In some cases, depending on the client, it may be open for business 24 hours a day. Employees may have to take calls from London, England, or Hawaii, he said, which would mean large time zone differences.

The facility will have 650-700 employees at full capacity. Garner said he thinks that will happen by the end of the year.

“We’re going to fill the facility up,” he said. “We’ll start off really, really quickly with the first 200, 250, 300. That will happen really fast.”

After that group is trained, it will be a more gradual pace along the lines of 40, 50 or 60 a month or 25 a week, he said.

There will also be 70 to 75 support staff. They will include site managers, operational managers, team leaders, HR specialists, finance specialists, IT people and trainers.

A typical shift will be eight hours. Lockers will be provided for employees who will be dealing with sensitive information such as customer credit card numbers. They will not be allowed to have cell phones or pens at their workstations. Team leaders or senior agents will be available to deal with irate customers.

“When people call for customer service, they usually don’t call when things are going well,” Garner added.

He was asked jokingly at both meetings if he thought there might be communication issues between employees and customers, such as the ones that occur with overseas outsourcing operations in places such as India, because of the local southern accent. He said there had been a outsourcing backlash over the last five years and the customer satisfaction rate goes down anytime a business goes offshore, but he didn’t think that would be a problem here.

No customer service agents have been hired yet, Garner said, but more than 300 applications have been received. Potential employees can apply online at Sitel’s Web site, at WKU-Glasgow campus and also get application information from the employment office.

Charlie Campbell, with the Glasgow-Barren County Industrial Development & Economic Authority, asked Garner why only half of the facility was ready. He explained that if the company invested capital to furnish both sides of the building before they had clients, it would be dead money for that period of time.

Between meetings, Garner and several of the local officials toured the Sitel facility on the Roseville Road. There is a large parking lot that can accommodate more than 600 employees and the building has a generator that can provide power for several weeks without an external source, he said.

Steve Newberry, a local businessman, commented that a CEO with more than 150 facilities doesn’t usually give personal tours and asked what makes Glasgow different. Garner said of his 154 operations they only own the “brick and mortar” on about 15 of them. The company normally utilizes pre-existing sites such as old Wal-Marts and Kmarts and freestanding retail stores, which don’t have the aesthetics of a new building. He said when they looked at constructing a new facility in the U.S. they wanted something close to corporate headquarters where they could bring potential clients to show them what a working site looks like.

He said what was attractive about Glasgow was its location halfway between Nashville and Louisville, its educational system and the standard of living.

“It’s a great community,” he said. “You can feel it when you drive around.”

He also added that the partnership with WKU-Glasgow to provide university students as potential employees was a unique opportunity.

When speaking to the Glasgow Rotary Club on Thursday afternoon, Garner told members as economic times worsen his company does better.

“Right now is a golden period for us,” he said. “As bad as this economy is, it’s great for me because what happens in times like these, large corporations cannot increase their revenue lines. They’re selling fewer units than they did before so they have to rationalize how they get costs out. ‘Can I outsource this component.’ We work as a partner, kind of as a right arm, to a lot of these companies we do business with.”

He said because of Sitel’s size the per-unit costs are much cheaper than what an individual company can do.

“This is what we do and what we focus on,” Garner said. “It’s better than what they can do in-house and more cost effective for companies.”

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