Issue 17 Gem's Philip Cassidy's passion shines through

philip cassidy

gem is one of Northern Ireland’s recent business success stories. The multichannel contact company has grown from a handful of employees to over 1,000 with a client list that reads like a who’s who of global companies. Owen McQuade met with its CEO and Founder, Philip Cassidy, to discuss the company’s future plans to extend its offering to the public sector.

‘Our passion shines through’ is the company strapline for multichannel, and multi-lingual, contact company gem. Its CEO is certainly passionate about what has sometimes been seen as a Cinderella industry. gem started in 2000 as an email contact company. Cassidy explains: “We had an idea that there wasn’t an outsourced email contact service centre. We then moved into telephone and other contact channels such as SMS, Livechat and whitemail. We started the company from scratch and now have around 1,000 people.”

gem’s high profile customers include Microsoft, CISCO and play.com, all leaders in their respective sectors. Cassidy explains how the company has grown so fast: “We have been successful at getting in there and moving up the value chain. Moving into more complex services with these customers. In most cases we have started with a small pilot and moved into other aspects of their business.”

gem has two contact centres in Belfast and one in Derry. It has just set up a new operation in Hungary to support its eastern European clients. Of its total employees, or agents as Cassidy calls them, 40 per cent are working on multilingual contracts. gem now supports 29 different languages. The company is also multi-channel with 70 per cent of its work telephone-based and 30 per cent electronic and white mail. gem recently won multi-media contact centre of the year in the European Contact Centre Awards, primarily because it is doing such a high volume of non-voice work.

gem’s offices are very striking with lots of purple and lime green in their decor. This is reflected in Cassidy’s view of what a workplace should be “a workplace should be a nice place to come to work”. Outward workings of this philosophy include breaks for playing games – the Wii console is an item not seen in many offices in this part of the world – and a day off on your birthday. This brings the conversation onto the culture of the company. Cassidy points to the framed diagram on the wall of the meeting room. It looks like a temple with the company’s vision as the roof supported by pillars stating the company’s values. He is very pragmatic in that he sees this as the way in which to get “buy-in” from his people. He adds: “A lot of people see call centres as a chicken coup environment and it [gem’s office] is far from that. It is a nice place to work and we try to promote that. Some call centres are very regimented. We try to bring an element of self management for our agents and they appreciate that. We have one of the lowest attrition rates in the industry. We have seen people who have left for more salary, then return to us because they like the environment at gem.”

gem recruits people for specific contracts to match skills sets to client needs. An example of this is the Natural England support contract, where a keen interest in geography is a must for those involved in supporting the public body. Those working on the play.com are advocates of the innovative website. Cassidy adds: “If people enjoy what they are doing they are happy to come to work and they tend to stay with us longer. It is more difficult to find people for the posts but it is worth it as they will stay longer and provide a better level of customer service.”

Lean government

Although gem does have public sector clients such as Natural England the bulk of gem’s work is for private sector clients. However, Cassidy sees this as changing in the future and sees significant opportunities to work with government over the coming years. He believes that gem can bring something to the public sector in terms of its learning from “challenging blue chip customers” in the private sector. He had just returned from New York the previous day, where the city’s 311 scheme was launched. He sees the introduction of a single 311-type contact number for public services in Northern Ireland as being achievable: “The private sector has done this and I know that there has been plenty of interest in New York’s 311 number introduction from this part of the world.”

Cassidy is very keen on the ‘lean’ business improvement method as first perfected by Toyota. He explains lean thinking: “We were one of the first companies to apply lean thinking to contact centres. It is about taking out failure demands; for contact centres a failure demand is really a call when it isn’t needed. That is, you should have something else in place to avoid that and then you try and take out the failures to avoid that demand.” He details one striking example of how gem has employed this technique. One of gem’s clients in the travel industry found that 35 per cent of calls it received were generated to find out what the baggage allowance was for their booking. gem worked with the client to improve baggage allowance information on the booking website and on ticketing. The amount of calls has now reduced to five per cent of the total. Cassidy says: “You might say why would we do something like that, when we are being paid to answer those calls. Well, it is about working with the client to solve such problems and as we get closer to them we move up the value chain away from simple queries about baggage allowance. Indeed we have generated more revenue by moving into more complex areas which in turn is more motivating for your people.”

Cassidy believes that such thinking will bring many benefits to Northern Ireland’s public sector: “We have the opportunity to deliver some efficiencies in government with the support of the private sector.” One example that is very relevant to the rationalisation of public services is the work gem has done with a global hardware company. gem started working with the global IT giant on a small pilot project to help them rationalise their European customer contact strategy. They had over 500 different ways of contacting the company across Europe. It now has just two: one telephone number and one email address. Both are operated from Northern Ireland by gem. The calls range from “I would like to talk to X” through to “I’m technical director of Deutsch Bank and my systems have gone down”.

Doing business in Northern Ireland

Although Northern Ireland is not always billed as being a good place to do business, gem’s experience has been very positive: “We have the skills here in Northern Ireland and gem has been supported by government when needed.” He also sees the cost base in Northern Ireland as a competitive advantage. Recent political developments have helped with more business people willing to visit the province and he adds: “From being seen as the place with the ‘Troubles’ to now being seen as a good destination for call centres. We couldn’t have done this 20 years ago, whereas now we see a lot of business visitors to Northern Ireland. They just would not have come here at the height of the Troubles.”

With nearly all gem’s customers – 98 per cent – coming from outside Northern Ireland, the company is a classic case of exportable tradable services. By exporting these services the company has made a significant contribution to the local economy. Indeed, it has paid £65 million in salaries since it started.

Getting up the value chain

gem’s strength has been in developing partnerships with many of the world’s leading companies. It has developed these relationships to deliver ever higher added-value services to its clients. Cassidy explains: “It is really very simple. You get to understand their needs and then deliver on them. It usually starts with one small thing that is the bane of their life.” An example of this is how the company forged a close relationship with one of the world’s leading software companies. The company could not get a support channel for one of its products for its customers in the Netherlands. It had tried call centres in both the Netherlands and in Dublin. gem recruited two Dutch speaking agents and has supported the product for the past six years. From this small start, gem now employs 90 staff working in 19 different languages supporting 435 different product email queues. Cassidy sees the success of this approach as “about building up trust and getting the culture right.”

This is a theme we return to several times in the interview and an area to which Cassidy obviously has given much thought and effort. He says that it is particularly challenging at gem trying to keep its processes constant with so many of its staff from different cultural backgrounds. For example, what someone from Northern Ireland might view as an acceptable way to talk to someone compared to someone from the Netherlands, with their more direct and often blunt approach to communicating.

Enterprising Northern Ireland

Like many entrepreneurs, Cassidy exudes an air of optimism when talking about the future – despite the current global economic outlook. He says that the last 10 years has been good for Northern Ireland: “You only have to look at the number of cranes on Belfast’s skyline. Since the ending of the Troubles Belfast is now a good business destination and a leader in providing those skills and a good education. That has to be good from an external perspective.” However, he believes that we do need to be more enterprising and entrepreneurial. Another aspect that is often overlooked is the spin-off businesses that are generated when a company grows as fast as gem has. The company has spawned at least three local entrepreneurial companies. As we were walking through the contact centre there were prominent wall charts showing real time information on incoming contacts. The developer who built these charts for gem went on to start his own software development company supporting call centres.

Future success