My line of business - the managing director

Do you find the multitude of roles that exist in the call centre sector a bit mind-boggling? Well, worry no more. Call Centre Helper is on hand to give you the low-down on the variety of jobs that exist in the world of call centres. Each month, we’ll be hearing from an individual who works in the sector and will not only discover what they do for a living, but also what their tips are for getting in to that line of work.

This month, we profile Martin Dove, managing director at Merchants

When I left school I worked in a variety of jobs in pubs, shops and even as a landscape gardener’s assistant. When I took a job at Merchants Ltd in 1986, I never imagined that 20 years later I would be managing director of the same organisation. However, once I was let loose on the phones I soon realised that I loved the call centre environment and the challenges it presented me with.

Working with Merchants has sent me all over the UK and abroad – to Los Angeles, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa. I cannot imagine a more varied and exciting place to work.

I have seen the growth of offshoring and huge developments in technology. However, as managing director I am faced with the challenge of managing projects across different countries with hundreds of employees. On average I travel abroad every other week to our offices in Holland and Ireland. On top of this, I travel to South Africa every six weeks as several of our UK customers offshore their contact centres to South Africa.

Merchants’ links with South Africa go beyond an outsourcing location, as it is also the home of Merchants’ parent company Dimension Data. We work closely with Dimension Data as it provides the technology to support our contact centre solutions. Dimension Data’s global network has been a real asset to Merchants as businesses have become more international in their outlook and have moved their contact centre operations to locations around the world. Offshoring is certainly one of the most significant trends I have observed in my years in the industry, and certainly the one that appears most in the newspapers.

The relationship with Dimension Data has also allowed Merchants to be far more than just an outsourcer. It enables us to provide solutions to customers that encompass the whole suite of technology solutions that our parent company can offer. The relationship works both ways as we at Merchants provide guidance on how to train staff and get the most out of a sophisticated piece of contact centre equipment or software. I have worked for both Dimension Data and Merchants during my career, and a key part of my current role is to ensure that our customers are able to benefit fully from these links. I am also passionate about taking Merchants’ consultancy services out to as wide an audience as possible.

Back to the beginning

This is a far cry from my first job at Merchants. I was a phoner; job titles certainly were not very imaginative back in 1986. Based in Queen’s Park, I started off on a new product launch selling Clear Blue pregnancy tests kits to pharmacies. Yet this experience of working on the phones has proved invaluable. I fully appreciate what it is like for the employees on the front line of the contact centre and never underestimate the value of their input in the pursuit of excellent customer service.

I stayed as an agent for a year before I was promoted to phoner manager, where I managed a team of ten. In my first management role I learnt many of the fundamentals of management that have stayed with me ever since. To this day the most satisfying thing about my job is the people I work with. You simply cannot beat the feeling of supporting someone to achieve what they didn’t believe was possible.

From this role, I was promoted to account manager and with it moved to Corby in Northamptonshire. Clients were increasingly realising that location was key to keeping down costs in the contact centre industry, a theme that was to recur throughout my career. It was as an account manager that I began to interface with Merchants’ clients.

The main focus of my job now is looking after those client relationships. Every morning I check the performance of all of our contact centres from the previous day and every week I hold a service review meeting with the account manager for each of our accounts. It certainly helps that I have been there and done the job myself. I’m able to empathise with the staff and offer positive practical solutions to any problems that arise in service delivery and operational issues. We also take this opportunity to discuss tactical and strategic opportunities for the contact centres we run.

After three years as an account manager in Corby I moved on to work for Countrywide Communications – a PR agency based in Banbury and in Knightsbridge. I was there for 18 months before moving on to work as sales and marketing manager for Shearings Coach Holidays in Wigan. My time away from Merchants was useful as it gave me experience working with a number of exciting companies and strengthened my understanding of marketing communications, which is extremely valuable when developing relationships with potential customers.

However, the pull of the contact centre proved too strong and in 1997 I rejoined Merchants and moved to Wellington, New Zealand. Here I worked in a consulting role, advising on the development of a new contact centre. This was a very exciting time for Merchants as it was at this point we began our partnership with Dimension Data and the true global nature of the contact centre industry really took off.

After one year in New Zealand, I went to work on a consulting project on call centre performance improvement in Cape Town. This lasted three years before I moved across to work with Dimension Data’s customer relationship management business unit, which took me to Johannesburg. At this time the dot com boom was in full swing and businesses were keen to hear how they could use technology most effectively in the contact centre environment. We were specifically managing the implementation of the Seibel Technology. This link between technology and those that use it – be they the contact centre agent or the consumer – is absolutely crucial to the success of a contact centre. We tend to find now that blended solutions of human and technology provide the highest levels of customer service at the best price for our clients so we are always keen to suggest ways by which the human relationships with technology can be strengthened.

Moving stateside

At this time Dimension Data was growing its US contact centre business and I moved to Los Angeles for two years. Jetting between Los Angeles, the contact centres in Chicago, Atlanta and St Louis, I realised I was an employee of a truly global firm. In a business built on communication, it is interesting to see how we all communicated on this global scale. The level of travel that has become such a central part of my job certainly indicates that while technology gets increasingly clever, there is still no substitute for face-to-face interaction.

After the success of the American project, I returned to South Africa to set up Merchants’ contact centre business. We grew the number of agents here from 75 to 2,000 in just three short years. South Africa has a number of distinct advantages as an offshore location for UK businesses – there is a strong degree of cultural synergy and only a very short time difference between the two countries. I moved back to the UK in January 2006 and was promoted to managing director in August of this year.

My job is now a combination of client management and new business development, and while I am focused on the Europe region, I am constantly interacting with people across the globe. There is no substitute for experience in the contact centre industry and now, as I manage staff, strategy and business development across so many countries, I glance back over my career history and remember how I maintained relations when I was in South Africa, New Zealand or the USA. Invariably this means lots of plane journeys, conference calling and reliance on e-mail.

We are living in a truly global community and I am very lucky to have a very experienced and able team working with me. This allows me to concentrate on developing relationships between the European business components and making sure that Merchants offers its clients the very highest levels of service for their customers and consultancy based on years of experience and technical expertise from around the world.

Looking back over the past 20 years, I considered what my advice would be to anyone looking for a career in the contact centre industry. Above all I would say, it’s important to find people who will act as your mentor and give you honest feedback. A willingness to give and receive feedback is one of the most valuable skills in management and something I have always made a priority throughout my career.

Above all, it is the people that make this industry and whenever I am on the shop floor seeing people work their way up the career ladder, I think back to my days as a phoner. I see how far I have come and all the barriers I have broken through to get to my current position. I know for sure I couldn’t have managed it without the support of colleagues along the way and I hope that I continue to offer Merchants’ employees the support I was so very lucky to experience.