By focusing on customer experience, we have been able to grow our business during the global economic crisis.

Andy Doig, Chief Operating Officer

 

Investing in a change

With a global downturn and a double-dip recession in the UK, most of the companies in our sector have adopted a survival strategy.

Webhelp UK decided that this was the moment to invest in a fundamental alteration of our business and our industry and transform ourselves from a traditional call centre to a business solutions provider.

We decided that Webhelp UK needed to become a key business partner delivering outstanding customer experience.

Growth is something companies tend to strive for when the economic climate is favourable, so this slump presented our clients with new challenges.  We decided to invest in creating fresh, new solutions to drive insight and innovation for our clients to help them overcome these challenges.

We chose to take a strategic path that required us to adapt our core values in order to help our clients solve their main strategic business issues.  We decided that Webhelp UK needed to become a key business partner delivering outstanding customer experience, and so we focused on strategic solutions and delivering business enhancing outcomes rather than providing commoditised services.

Through this investment in our infrastructure, our core operating methodologies, our management and our people, we rebuilt our strategy from the ground up. But perhaps most crucially of all, we focussed intensely on doing the things we understood to be most central to our clients; reducing costs, improving customer retention, improving customer loyalty, and improving customer spend and wallet share. In short we stopped thinking like a contact centre and evolved into a customer experience company which delivers an enhanced relationship between our clients and their customers that directly improves our clients’ business success.

We now work at a deeper level with our clients, adding more value, sharing their objectives, taking more risk on a gain-share basis.  By behaving like a true partner by investing in their business success, this enables us to provide real value to the full extent of our capability.

Becoming a true strategic partner for our clients

As a business we are very fortunate to work with some of the UK’s leading brands who had also come to the same conclusion as ourselves – that the old model of contact centre outsourcing, while delivering tactical benefits such as flexibility, could never deliver the real business value that we have been able to create for our clients by working as a true strategic partner.

We are better placed to take responsibility for their customer management, due to our dedicated focus and expertise in customer experience.

These days we spend much more time focusing on improvements in driving customer loyalty, advocacy and spend.

Clients have increasingly come to realise that, more often than not, we are better placed to take responsibility for their customer management, due to our dedicated focus and expertise in customer experience.  We have become specialists at taking over and improving clients’ in-house capability through the application of our methodologies, and then delivering customer experience as a managed service.

Our journey is by no means complete but we remain committed to being at the vanguard of a new wave of outsourced customer management, delivering strategic partnerships aimed at creating a unique value customer experience for the benefit of our clients and their customers.