When young re-migrant couple Adrian and Carole Collins opened their call centre two-and-a-half-years ago, they started with just over two dozen employees. Today, Clear Connect counts Office Depot, one of America’s largest office supplies companies, as its biggest client and it counts just under 250 people as employees.
According to Adrian Collins, without the popular US-based company, Clear Connect would not have progressed at such a rate. Office Depot was its first client when the company opened its doors in 2007, said Collins, noting that it still remains the firm’s largest client. Collins, who once worked at Office Depot in the US, heading its foreign investment department, said the venture has not been a mistake, as the results have been great. Additionally, he noted that Clear Connect has made a fairly substantial investment since it began operations and he estimated the figure to be in the area of two hundred million dollars.
Collins credited Office Depot’s Vice-President (Cus-tomer Service) Tim McGrath as the person who was instrumental in making his business a reality. McGrath made the decision to invest in the idea by employing Clear Connect to provide assistance to Office Depot’s customers in the US. Clear Connect’s employees usually take orders from Office Depot’s customers or their complaints and log them into the system for the company to act on.
According to McGrath, who is on his second trip to Guyana, in the beginning it was his respect for Collins that prompted him to make the trip to Guyana. However, after he arrived, he said, “We noticed the intelligence, the dedication, the English and the desire to serve customers, so we took a risk.” He added that it is a risk that his company has not regretted. “It has worked out for our customers. The quality is great for our customers and because of how Adrian and his team at Clear Connect have been performing over the last two and a half years, we have kept adding and adding and we will expand as long as he continues to get the same great results,” McGrath said.
He added, “We have gone in-depth to asking our customers specifically how they like each agent that they talk to and our customers are giving rave [reviews] to the Guyana agents of Clear Connect. So as long as our customers keep liking Guyanese people we are going to be keep sending a lot more work here.”
Calls from Office Depot customers are routed to about four different countries around the world. Guyana is the only Caribbean country among the four.
Collins left Guyana when he was ten years old and only returned three years ago. He said his return has a lot to do with his wife, Carole, part owner of the company, who is also Guyanese. She left to attend university overseas.
Collins said the investment in Guyana has been worth it and while Office Depot is the company’s largest client, there are some smaller clients as well. He noted that some of them “come and go,” depending on what is happening in the environment. However, he noted that the business is growing gradually. According to Collins, his agents are trained for two weeks on Office Depot. The firm usually interviews and selects persons who have high skills set in computers and locations. Most of the employees are very young and Carole said it has to do with the fact that it is a “good entry level job” and also because the young people are more computer savvy than the older persons.
Her husband added that there are a lot of managerial jobs at the company and those persons interact with high level officials at Office Depot. “If you were living in the US, these same people wouldn’t be anywhere near dealing with these folks, so they [his employees] mature through the organisation. Almost everybody who comes into this organisation comes on the phone and then they progress so that is a really attractive thing and they take these experiences with them and they learn how to conduct themselves in business and how to deal with people,” he said.
He also noted that Clear Connect plans to expand to other parts of the country, while adding that it is very “difficult” to get new customers as “you have to be around and it is always a hard task finding clients, finding good clients, clients that share similar business practices that you respect….”
He also noted that Clear Connect does not view the other local call centres-there are four others-as competition, since their clients come from outside of Guyana and most of the “people we speak to don’t even know where Guyana is to begin with, much less that we have other call centres. So it’s a big world and we don‘t really find ourselves competing.”
Meanwhile, Investment Officer of the Guyana Office For Investment (Go-Invest) Roxanne Summer said she has found that all the call centres are “unique” in their own way in the service they provide. Summer said Go-Invest has found that the call centres provide jobs for many young persons, giving hope to persons who graduate.
Large companies usually route their calls through the developing world because it is cheaper, since they pay the agents a fraction of what they would have to pay persons doing the same jobs in places like the US, UK, Canada and other large countries.
On its website Clear Connect is described as a company that provides a unique solution to today’s outsourcing market. It is stated that the company provides “a near shore, native English-speaking centre with strong Western culturalisation” and close ties to the US, Canada and the UK. “The unmatched value Clear Connect delivers to its clients allows them to improve their outsourcing benefits while significantly reducing their outsourcing costs,” the company said.
