Sunday, February 10, 2013
C3: Love Makes The Workplace Go Round
C3: Love Makes The Workplace Go Round
“<”
+ “3” = LOVE
Try
to type this in Facebook, and you will get a heart.
This graphic
animation often used in social media messaging is a simplistic and
lighthearted depiction of a complex emotion. Love in any form needs
demonstration. When one sees love, watches it grow, feels it, lives
it, gives and receives it, it becomes real and the most amazing
thing, especially if it happens in, of all places, a customer contact
center.
The
notion of love is alive and well in C3, a customer communications
outsourcer, whose customer contact representatives are surrounded by
love, literally as the word fills the spaces on
the
walls and cubicles around them, and figuratively. Beyond the literal
sense and corporate speak, C3 makes a difference in the information
communication technology industry because of its culture of love.
C3’s
full name, C3/CustomerContactChannels, spells out its very essence:
Customer, which means that C3 is a company that serves the customer
above all else, with full intent to resolve issues quickly, and to do
things excellently; Contact, as C3 is an expert in contact center
management; and Channels, through which C3 says, for every issue
there is a way, there is an answer.
The
company was founded by the same team that founded Precision Response
Corporation (PRC), turning C3 into a Business Process Outsourcing
(BPO) company providing customer management solution worldwide. The
company has opened customer contact centers throughout the Unites
States, Asia, Europe and Central America and boasts of several
Fortune 500 companies as its clients. C3 is backed by Stone Point
Capital, a private equity firm that has raised and managed private
equity funds with aggregate committed capital of $9 billion.
Love what you do
At C3, “Love What You Do” is not a cliché; it is a way of life. From the point of hire, the tagline comes alive for every employee in C3 and it becomes an essential way of doing things. C3 Philippines was organized by a core team of seven people, all of whom are seasoned professionals in the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry. They brought with them a shared history, the key officers having worked together for almost 10 years in different contact center industries worldwide; tenure; and, the best practices from the industry including their own innovations on how to make a workplace a love-filled hotbed of productivity. This core team knew what was needed to do to make their idea of a dream company become a reality. And this is exactly what they did. They built C3 to be a place of work where someone can love what they do.
The Philippines being the number one call center destination in the world, employing over 600,000 agents and surpassing India’s 350,000, makes it the ideal place to plant the C3 culture of love. The Philippine contact center industry has grown exponentially in the last five years, contributing a staggering $11 billion (5%) to the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This growth has spurred a growth in the income levels of contact center agents.
But being paid well is not everything, according to Kevin Urrutia, C3’s Vice President for Operations. The contact center industry has seen a high attrition rate even if higher salaries and more bonuses are offered. While the industry average of attrition is 10 percent (10%), C3 only has an attrition rate of between 3 percent (3%) to 4 percent (4%), a significant indicator of how the culture of love in a workplace can affect employee longevity.
“I love people. There is a sense of joy and fulfillment from being able to help someone, which makes me love coming to work every day,” he enthuses. It’s this genuine love and care for people that reflect on the people around him. For instance, he calls everyone by their first names. Even if he is an executive of the company, he treats his employees as peers. “At the end of the day,” he adds, “everybody is equal.”
Do what you love
It is everyone’s dream to get to do what they love. And when that dream comes true, it makes everything click: the job becomes effortless. Rick Ferry, CustomerContactChannels’ president and COO, explains, “The whole theme is to love coming to work in the morning, love where you work, love who you work for, love who you work with – it comes from the old notion that if you love what you do, then you never ‘work’ a day in your life. There’s a great deal of responsibility that goes behind that word and that overall theme; we have to live that every day. Essentially, we want our staff to enjoy what they do and be proud of it.”
At C3, an employee’s life begins with a mutual understanding of respect, responsibility, and passion. And as this work culture blossoms, employees become enamored with the dream that indeed they can love what they do. He can learn to give all that he’s got; to be taught and trained so that he could offer solutions to clients; to increase his skills and therefore his confidence in looking for ways to help; to adapt to changing situations and rise to different challenges – and as he learns to do all these things at C3, he will end up doing what he loves and making his dream work become a reality.
Jill Vivas, Senior Operations Manager and one of the members of the original core team, says, “At C3, we have an open door policy and employees can talk to us anytime. They can bypass their immediate supervisor and talk to any manager. Even the highest officer, our country manager Andy Sarakinis, is available anytime.”
Jill says she was touched when Andy opened his home to his employees during a string of storms in August this year. Another manager, Chris Cardenas, drove employees from their homes to the C3 building’s training rooms, which were made into temporary shelters for employees and their families. She says she has never heard or experienced such kind of caring from employers before. Things like these make employees fiercely loyal to C3, she observes.
C3 is taking the Philippines by storm in an unconventional way: by helping its agents learn to love what they do, love where they work, love who they work with and love coming to work. Love in the workplace equals productivity and a rewarding experience. Love the C3 way opens the way to living the dream in the workplace.
About C3
C3/CustomerContactChannels is a global provider of contact center services unlike any other in the market today. Services include sales, service, performance optimization, reputation management and complete customer interaction management via traditional, web, and emerging communication channels. C3 positively engages and promotes our clients’ brands with every contact we make with their customers. With a global team that is thousands of employees strong, the company is headquartered in Plantation, FL. More information can be found at www.c3connect.com and http://jobs.c3connect.com/manila
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