Claudine Housen, Staff Reporter
Patrick Casserly, chief executive officer and manager administrative services of e-Services, in Montego Bay. - CLAUDINE HOUSEN/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
WESTERN BUREAU:
THE LEADING player in the island's call centre industry, Patrick Casserly, chief executive officer of e-Services Group International, credits a major part of his success with the company to his commitment to investing in its people.
"You have to invest in the people, that is the asset of the company you could have all these buildings, all the technology in the world but if you don't have people who are ready and willing to answer the calls you have nothing," he said.
"In the United States the call centre industry is built on churning staff, churning staff means that they probably have 70-80 per cent attrition every year. At e-Services I took a different approach. I said OK we are going to provide quality employees and how you do that is to retain them over time. So some of my very first employees, hired six years ago in the first 35, are still with us today and we have less than 10 per cent attrition per annum."
Noting that the only way to achieve and maintain a single digit attrition rate in any company is "through taking measured steps in ensuring that the primary asset of the company, which is its people, is protected," Mr Casserly has implemented several programmes to keep his employees motivated. From flexible work hours to free health and life insurance to Internet access in the cafeteria, management has thought about it.
Buoyed by his belief that communication on any level is essential to a successful organisation, Mr. Casserly has taken this notion a step further by doing away with certain trappings of the business world. One example of this is the movement away from the concept of a human resource (HR) department.
"I don't have a HR department in the company. Instead we have an employee development department," he said. "It is not a traditional HR department in that employee development is there to do exactly that - develop the employees through recruitment and training. The day-to-day management of our employees resides with the business unit management, so if you are going to terminate an employee you do not send them to an HR department you are going to have to sit down in front of that person and explain why they are terminated."
"(However,) when we fire resource we have to replace that resource, and we believe that it is far better to make that resource successful. Now for instance, unless you do something for cause, in this company we have management action plans which mean that the manager puts together a series of steps so that this person who is currently failing will succeed."
A graduate of the University of North Carolina, in the United States, where he read for a bachelor's degree in economics, Mr. Casserly first worked as a sales manager then sales agent/operations manager for a large computer firm in the U.S. before returning to Jamaica.
"One day there was an ice storm and my car was iced over and I said that was it. It is time to go back to the rock, so I came back to Jamaica and joined Eagle," he said. "From there I got an opportunity from National Processing Company (NPC), which is now ACS."
BUILDER OF ENTERPRISES
After three years as the head of NPC Mr. Casserly, who considers himself a builder of enterprises rather than a maintenance person, left the company to form e-Services Group International.
"I tended to do three or so years in any enterprise because I like to build. I am not a steady state manager I prefer to build rather than just maintain," he explained "Having achieved what I thought I needed to achieve at NPC (now ACS) I wanted to build something again in 2000 when I got this opportunity and took it."
Surpassing his self-imposed three-year limit by another three years, Mr. Casserly has taken e-Services from an employment capacity of 35 employees more than 1,500 persons and is looking to add another 1,000 employees by the end of this year.
"When we started with the first 5,000 feet we did not have any carpets, walls or tiles it was all just concrete floor because behind the walls was rice - floor to ceiling rice this was the warehouse for grains Jamaica," he recalled. "We grew into another section and eventually got to 120 -130 people by year end and now we are just short of 1,600."
"Our percentage growth is going to be about 60-70 per cent this year but it is on existing lines of business plus one new client," he added.
According to Mr. Casserly there are still endless growth opportunities in the local and international industry as trends are now moving in favour of countries like Jamaica, which are easily accessible.
"Traditional outsourcing countries like India take 18-20 hours to get to," he said. ?The Philippines takes a similar time while travelling to Jamaica from Miami is an hour and 20 minutes, from Chicago it is three and a half hours and from New York three hours.?
"The trend is moving in our favour there is this term now 'nearshore' which you will hear in the industry. It is a term which has been created for us. It means that we are closer and more accessible. We are no longer considered offshore," Mr. Casserly continued noting that given the close proximity to Jamaica there are clients, "who leave New York to Jamaica in the morning on the 6: 30 a.m. flight and return in the evening."
To capitalise on this opportunity e-Services will have to overcome some of its most biting problems such as the problem with the available pool of human resources, in Western Jamaica, and adequate space with which to carry out its services.
"The available resource in Montego Bay is really difficult. We are getting a one in 12 success rate between applicant and new hire which means if we have to hire 100 people we need 1, 200 applicants," Mr. Casserly explained. "So what we have decided to do as a company is set up our own school inside the company which will have 50 people at a time."
"Basically our biggest gap is language skills so what we are going to do is, say you qualify for the job but your language skills aren't where they should be, we are going to put you in school and we are going to pay you $3,500 a week to be in school for a month, or two months if necessary, but at the back of it you will become a full e-Services employee."
To combat the more difficult problem of space, Mr. Casserly admitted that while he will not give up trying to acquire space in Kingston, where there is a large resource base, his only other option is to move into other Caribbean islands.
"I want Kingston to be the gem. There is no other city (including Portmore) south of Miami with 1.2 million English-speaking people," he said. ?A lot of people do not recognise that Jamaica is the third largest English speaking country in the Western Hemisphere.?
On May 18, e-Services will be opening up in St. Lucia and with an expected employee capacity of 150 by December. It is expected that the operation will be a significant employer in the country.
E-Services Group International is an information technology based company that provides back office work such as ad placement and customer care to major corporations in the United States. It operates 365 days of the year from 7:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m.
A self proclaimed child of the 70s, Mr. Casserly credits his drive to his parents, who taught him humility, his preparatory school teacher Daphne K. Vidal Smith for her strong sense of discipline, high school teacher, father George Farrell, who taught him the importance of thinking through problems and Michael Manley who engendered in him a strong sense of nationalism.
