Sykes Enterprises, Inc. - Call Centers - Category Directory

400 N. Ashley Drive

Tampa, Florida 33602
(813) 274-1000
www.sykes.com

Sales

$480 million

Business Description

Sykes Enterprises, Incorporated and consolidated subsidiaries (“Sykes,” “our,” “us” or “we”) is a global leader in providing outsourced customer contact management solutions and services in the business process outsourcing (“BPO”) arena. We provide an array of sophisticated customer contact management solutions to Fortune 1000 companies around the world primarily in the communications, technology/consumer, financial services, healthcare and transportation and leisure industries. We serve our clients through two geographic operating regions: the Americas (United States, Canada, Latin America, India and the Asia Pacific Rim) and EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa). Our Americas and EMEA groups primarily provide customer contact outsourcing services with an emphasis on inbound technical support and customer service. These services are delivered through multiple communications channels encompassing phone, e-mail, Web and chat. We also provide various enterprise support services in the United States that encompass services for our client’s internal support operations, from technical staffing services to outsourced corporate help desk services. In Europe, we also provide fulfillment services including multilingual sales order processing via the Internet and phone, inventory control, product delivery and product returns handling. Our complete service offering helps our clients acquire, serve, retain and grow relationships with their customers. We have developed an extensive global reach with 42 state-of-the-art customer contact management centers throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa.

Services

We specialize in providing inbound outsourced customer contact management solutions in the BPO arena on a global basis. Our customer contact management services are provided through two operating segments — the Americas and EMEA. The Americas region, representing 66.9% of consolidated revenues in 2003, includes the United States, Canada, Latin America, India and the Asia Pacific Rim. The sites within Latin America, India and the Asia Pacific Rim are included in the Americas region as they provide a significant service delivery vehicle for U.S. based companies that are utilizing our customer contact management solutions in these locations to support their customer care needs. The EMEA region, representing 33.1% of consolidated revenues in 2003, includes Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The following is a description of our customer contact management solutions:

Outsourced Customer Contact Management Services. Our outsourced customer contact management services represented approximately 97.0% of total 2003 consolidated revenues. We handle over 700,000 customer contacts including phone, e-mail, Web and chat on a daily basis throughout the Americas and EMEA regions. We provide these services utilizing our advanced technology infrastructure, human resource management skills and industry experience. These services include:

• Customer care — Customer care contacts primarily include product information requests, describing product features, activating customer accounts, resolving complaints, handling billing inquiries, changing addresses, claims handling, ordering/reservations, prequalification and warranty management;

• Technical support — Technical support contacts primarily include handling inquiries regarding hardware, software, communications services, communications equipment, Internet access technology and Internet portal usage; and

• Acquisition — Our acquisition services are primarily focused on inbound up-selling/cross-selling of our client’s products and services.

We provide these services through our extensive global network of customer contact management centers, where our customer contact agents provide support in over 30 languages. Our technology infrastructure and managed service solutions allow for effective distribution of calls to one or more centers. These technology offerings provide our clients and us with the leading edge tools needed to maximize quality and customer satisfaction while controlling and minimizing costs.

Fulfillment Services. In Europe, we offer fulfillment services that are fully integrated with our customer care and technical support services. Our fulfillment solutions include multilingual sales order processing via the Internet and phone, payment processing, inventory control, product delivery and product returns handling.

Enterprise Support Services. In the United States, we provide a range of enterprise support services including technical staffing services and outsourced corporate help desk solutions.

Operations

Customer Contact Management Centers. We operate 17 stand-alone customer contact management centers in Europe, the Middle East and South Africa, 13 centers in the United States, 3 centers in Canada and 9 centers offshore, including The Peoples Republic of China, the Philippines, India and Costa Rica. El Salvador, a new customer contact management center, is expected to open in the early part of 2004.

New customer contact management centers are established to accommodate anticipated growth in our business or in response to a specific client need. In an effort to stay ahead of industry trends, we opened our first customer contact management centers in the Philippines and Costa Rica over six years ago. By 2003, we expanded to five centers in the Philippines, two in Costa Rica, one in The People’s Republic of China and one in India and are planning additional capacity expansion in the Philippines throughout 2004.

Due to shifts in business demand for offshore customer contact management centers, we decided to close several under-utilized customer contact management centers in the United States in late 2003 and may close additional centers in 2004. In Europe, we have also taken steps to close certain under-utilized customer contact management centers due to lower call volumes resulting from the soft global economy.

We utilize a sophisticated workforce management system to provide efficient scheduling of personnel. Our internally developed digital private communications network — the aforementioned ATM — complements our workforce by allowing for effective call volume management and disaster recovery backup. Through this network and our dynamic intelligent call routing capabilities, we can rapidly respond to changes in client call volumes and move call volume traffic based on agent availability and skill throughout our network of centers, improving the responsiveness and productivity of our agents. We also can offer cost competitive solutions for taking U.S. based calls to our offshore locations.

We capture and download customer contact information for reporting on a daily basis and this information can be viewed for any period of time, including on a real time basis. This data provides our clients with direct visibility into the service that we are providing for them. It also provides our management with the information required for effective management of our operations.

Our customer contact management centers are protected by a fire extinguishing system, backup generators and short-term battery backups in the event of a power outage, reduced voltage or a power surge. Rerouting of call volumes to other customer contact management centers is also available in the event of a telecommunications failure, natural disaster or other emergency. Security measures are imposed to prevent unauthorized physical access. Software and related data files are backed up daily and stored off site at multiple locations. We carry business interruption insurance covering interruptions that might occur as a result of damage to our business.

Fulfillment Centers. We currently have four fulfillment centers located in Europe. We provide our fulfillment services primarily to certain clients operating in Europe who desire this complementary service in connection with outsourced customer contact management services.

Enterprise Support Services Offices. Our three enterprise support services offices are located in metropolitan areas in the United States to provide a strong recruiting platform for high-end knowledge workers and to establish a local presence to service major accounts.

Quality Assurance

We believe that providing superior, quality service is critical in our clients’ decisions to outsource and in building long-term relationships with our clients. It is also our belief and commitment that quality is the responsibility of each individual at every level of the organization. To ensure service excellence and continuity across our organization, we have developed an integrated Quality Assurance program consisting of three major components:

• The certification of client accounts and customer contact management centers to the SSE program;

• The application of continuous improvement to all business processes; and

• The application of process audits to all work procedures.

The SSE program is a quality certification standard that was developed based on our more than twenty-five years of experience, and best practices from industry standards such as the COPC and Support Center Practices (SCP). It defines the requirements across all aspects of the business, and has a well-defined auditing process to ensure compliance and to gain certification.

The application of continuous improvement is established by SSE and is based upon the five-step Six Sigma cycle of Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control. All managers are responsible for continuous improvement in their operations.

Process audits are used to verify that client processes and procedures are consistently executed as required by established documentation. Process audits are applicable to all services being provided for the client. Quality monitoring and coaching are also core components of our approach to quality. We utilize industry best practices to ensure that our employees handle customer interactions with the care, accuracy and timeliness needed.

Two of our customer contact management centers in Europe have received COPC certification. We are also pursuing COPC certification for several additional centers in Europe and our offshore markets. The COPC standard was first developed in 1996 by representatives from American Express, Dell, L.L. Bean, Microsoft, Motorola, Novell and other customer-focused companies that wanted measurable standards to improve the level of service quality their customers received from external customer service providers.