Ashford W. Meikle, Business Reporter
Rodney Davis, president of Cable and Wireless Jamaica, says the telecoms company is still not an efficient operation. - File
Cable and Wireless Jamaica (C&WJ), which in the last three months has faced the ire of customers complaining of the lengthy delays accessing call-centre operators, says its service levels have improved since it out-sourced customer care support for its 2.5 million mobile, internet and wireless customers.
On Tuesday, C&WJ president, Rodney Davis, said the reorganisa-tion had resulted in a more efficient company, though he later acknowledged that big problems remained with its broadband internet service.
He also acknolwedged that 'intensified' competition showed no signs of slacking off, and that more reorganisations were pending at the telecoms company.
Service levels
"In the last three weeks, the service levels have gone up substantially. In fact our mobile service levels are actually ahead of when we first outsourced the centre," Davis told the Financial Gleaner.
"Voice service levels are approaching the level when we outsourced it."
The tough decisions Davis seems to be making now follows a visit he made to London in September to meet with his bosses. That visit had prompted speculation that Davis, only a year on the job, might be axed, given disappointing results from C&WJ.
But he was reaffirmed by London as their man in Kingston, with C&W head of Caribbean business, Chris Hetherington, endorsing Davis as "doing the right things."
Accent Marketing Services, located at the Citibank building on Knutsford Boulevard in New Kingston, officially announced the start of its operations Tuesday.
The call centre has been contracted C&WJ to operate its contact centre.
But, based on anecdotal evi-dence, problems still plague the company.
"The internet is the tough one that we are working diligently on sorting out," said Davis.
"That really is something more than a contact centre issue and
has to do a bit with our own operations."
Several factors
He said the "quality of the network and reliability" were factors, adding that the company was about to launch "A major company-wide initiative to try and sort out some of the things that are causing the internet service levels to be where they are."
Earlier this year C&WJ sent home over 200 customer care employees, but it still handles its telemarketing services.
Based in Jefferson, Indiana, Access took the bulk of the displaced C&WJ workers into its Kingston operation.
The company is located on almost 19,000 square feet of office space - formerly the near-shore contact centre for another U.S.- based communications company - spread across three floors on the Citibank building.
Access employs about 280 agents, support staff and managers.
Davis refused to say how much the contract with the call centre agent is worth, except to say it would result in significant cost savings to the company.
He told Financial Gleaner that he was not satisfied with the efficiencies of C&WJ and while declining to say if more redun-dancies were on the horizon, mentioned that the company would take a strategic look at its operations.
"I can't tell you whether we are as lean as we want to be, but I think we could be leaner. It's not an issue of more employees or less employees, it's an issue of how efficient we are ..."
To extract more revenues, C&WJ which, for its 2005 financial year saw net profit dip six per cent to $2.1 billion on a one per cent reduction in revenues of $22.5 billion, will continue with its company-wide reorganisation.
"Competition in the marketplace is not going down; it's going to continue to intensify," said Davis. "As I said, we are going to embark on a company-wide initiative that is really going to be designed to re-examine how efficient we are in everything we do."
He said the prepaid landline service, which was introduced in June this year, had signed up over 40,000 customers.
- ashford.meikle@gleanerjm.com
