The outsourced contact center provider has a global reach, with 45 call centers in 19 countries.

by Jeff Goldman [October 15, 2008]

Sykes Enterprises was founded in 1977 as a three-person engineering firm, and has expanded significantly since then—the company now boasts over 30,000 employees in 19 countries. "They went on to do some work in central office engineering for telephone companies, and also did some work writing technical manuals," says Dan Hernandez, the company's senior vice president of global strategy. "It was always a service company, but it's had several phases… and now is very big as an outsourced contact center provider."

The contact center offering, Hernandez says, came out of Sykes' technical writing work. "When the company was writing technical support manuals, they saw there was a little 800 number on the bottom—and John [Sykes] was very much an innovator and an entrepreneur," he says. "He came across a business opportunity to purchase a small call center in Sterling, Colorado—that was the first contact center that Sykes acquired, and it then grew very rapidly in the business after that."

Sykes Voice: (800) TO-SYKES

The company offers both inbound and outbound calling services as well as chat and e-mail support. "And we're very focused as a service provider," Hernandez says. "Where several of our competitors also do some technology, some IT infrastructure consulting, some billing solutions, we've decided to remain focused on services. As such, we've diversified the services that we offer across several verticals and several geographies—which has really worked to our benefit."

Key strengths
The company's long history, Hernandez says, is its greatest selling point. "We've been supporting the ISP market for a long time," he says. "We've supported the key players in the industry, both on the access side and the content side, and from that experience we're able to efficiently and effectively hire, staff, train, support and innovate ideas for them to improve lifetime value from their customers. It really is our experience, and who we have our experience with, that makes us very good at providing support services."

And transparency, Hernandez says, is a key focus. "We offer our clients an information portal where they can see near time statistics," he says. "It's updated every 30 minutes or every 15 minutes, based upon the client's needs, so they can see their call statistics throughout the day, they can see their speed of answer—and we provide them insights to the quality reports from the agents. We believe that full transparency is critical to our clients, and we provide that to them."

Hernandez says Sykes' worldwide reach gives it enormous flexibility in terms of the languages the company is able to support. "For an American ISP in the U.S., the two key languages of course are English and Spanish—but we also have support services around the world in German and Mandarin, because we support other carriers or content providers in China and Germany and the U.K., and throughout the world," he says.

Pricing and options
Pricing for Sykes' services can be structured in a variety of ways. "Our clients will look at what derives the best value for them," Hernandez says. "It could be a per minute price, it could be transaction based pricing, it could be time and materials, full time equivalent based pricing—it really depends upon their call volumes, their arrival patterns, the way they want their services staffed—and based upon that, we're able to tailor value-based programs for them."

With 45 call centers worldwide, a variety of support locations are also available. "We work with the client to first understand the nature of their calls and the manner in which they want to represent their brand to their customers," Hernandez says. "Based upon that, we'll go through the qualification and requirements for those that we'll hire to staff their program, and look at the alternatives for where to place that program's support—either domestically or internationally, near shore or offshore, or a mix of all three."

Hernandez says the biggest change that Sykes has faced in the market over the past few years is the growing diversification inherent in the ISP industry. "The services being offered by our clients have diversified… and we've been able to leverage our skill set across each of what used to be separate silos of solutions for their end customers, which are now becoming more integrated," he says.

Ultimately, Hernandez says, this is a particularly good time to be turning to a provider like Sykes. "The reasons for going with an outsourcer haven't changed much—if anything, the current events in the economy make it even more attractive as access to capital becomes much more limited… and Sykes is a solid company financially, a solid company performance-wise, and a proven partner in this space," he says. "And I think it's important for any ISP to evaluate the strength of each—in particular at times like these."

— End

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Online resources:
	Outsourced Customer Support Directory
	Quick Reference Chart