John Linton
...but some people think they are.
We made it to Colombo but due to a variety of circumstances we didn't check in to the hotel until 1.00 am in the morning which is 6.30 am Sydney time - a long travel time. It was a little strange leaving Sydney with temperatures in the 30s and arriving to a 'cool' Sri Lanka at 25 degrees - though the 99% humidity level reminded you that you were in the tropics. It was raining (out of season) which made the always 'exciting' drive from the airport to the hotel a touch more hair raising. Nevertheless it is nice to return to this country which, despite the crushing rural and fringe city poverty maintains a cheerful and helpful attitude in almost everyone you meet.
My main objective this trip is to review the basic operations of the Sri Lankan company from the ground up now that the new General Manager has had six months or so to make whatever agreed changes he believed were appropriate and to recruit people who will meet the objectives we have set for the overall Sri Lankan operation. Anette will do the quarterly reviews with each Sri Lankan employee as a separate process and we will then hold a joint review of exactly what pint we have reached and set monthly goals for the remainder of the financial year. It is an ambitious program to be completed in 4 working days and we also have to make time for a number of 'outside' meetings which will not make it any easier.
Occasionally, and less recently than when we commenced this 'venture', I get ranted at for "taking Aussie jobs offshore". Such rants simply demonstrate the stupidity of the ranter who presumably uses a modem from the PRC to connect his Taiwanese made computer to the internet while watching his down loaded movies on a Korean LCD or Plasma display. We set up support and logistical services in Sri Lanka to allow the various ranters to get the best possible value for the lowest possible price and to be able to remain in business in a very competitive set of market places. (as I'm writing this blog I'm sitting next to someone answering support/sales calls and she is calm, correct, precise and very, very helpful and very, very patient).
There is simply no comparison in the quality of dedication to the work and the knowledge brought to the work and, most importantly, the longevity of willingness to continue to work in a call centre/support centre operation of our Sri Lankan personnel to all my experiences of being associated with Australians working in Australian based call centres. Our first three Sri Lankan engineers are still with us and will reach their fifth anniversary as Exetel employees in the first quarter of next year. The longest any of our Australian engineers remained in a call centre position was less than two years before they had to be offered another engineering job within Exetel or we would lose them. There is nothing wrong with that - engineers in Australia will accept a 'starting position' in a call centre to get a job straight out of university or TAFE but that's exactly how they regard it - "not a real job" and one that they try to get away from as quickly as possible. Of course you can get slightly longer service out of non-engineering graduates (particularly people who have not got degrees and there very definitely are a small percentage of people who do really want to become a support professional - but at least in my experience, they are a minority - though I have been associated with several exceptional exceptions.
Completely different attitude in Sri Lanka.
When we began the process of transferring residential support, residential sales, admin and provisioning jobs from Sydney to Colombo we recognised that we would lose the accumulated experience of all of those different people in Sydney and our base accumulated knowledge of those processes would go from somewhere around 750 'man months' to zero over a short space of time. It was a known risk and a known sacrifice that we were prepared to endure in the short term for the medium and long term benefits that we were certain the process would deliver. You don't have to be a business genius to understand that if you have support personnel with an average of 3 years in the job then they will do a better job than if they only had a maximum of nine or so months.
This review will establish how much progress has been made to making the Exetel call centre as good as any similar call centre on the planet. More importantly it will allow bench marks to be put in place to continue to drive all aspects of the Sri Lankan operation towards better performances, whatever the current levels, than the ones that are currently being achieved. I have always been impressed by our Sri Lankan people and I don't expect to see any decline in the operation in any way and, based on the figures and QOS measures we have in place I am looking forward to the next few days and hope to play a part in assisting the continuing development of the Exetel people here.