Access to a good pool of talented, ambitious and committed workers is driving a steady recruitment drive in the Irish operations of Telus International.
The customer experience (CX) company, which employs around 2,000 people in Cork and Dublin and fast approaching 50,000 worldwide, says that its ability to attract and retain quality workers is driven largely by its deep commitment to its own people and to the opportunities for personal development that it offers them.
“The talent pipeline is very strong right now and we are currently on a recrutment drive,” said Roger Clancy, vice president of operations and general manager of Telus International Ireland and France. “The current generation of workers have very strong views about the values and culture of where they want to work.
“They are committed to sustainability, and to diversity and inclusion in the workplace. They are also very focused on their own personal growth. We urge people to innovate and to take the opportunities that are in front of them.”
Telus especially invites workers to come up with ideas that add value to the services provided to its customers.
Telus’s range of services include digital strategy, innovation, consulting and design, digital transformation and IT lifecycle solutions, data annotation, intelligent automation and omnichannel CX solutions.
Telus has many different types of customer. Typically, its clients are Fortune 500 companies in areas such as technoloy, fintech, SAS, IoT, games, travel, hosptality and healthcare. Most of them are open to receiving far more than just back-office data processing and call centre services.
“We encourage our team members to think like our customers,” said Roger Clancy. “They must ask themselves how can we make the interaction with the customer more positive. We encourage our team to look at how they can remove non-value-add work.
“Our team members are very well educated. They want to tackle higher-grade work. They build Lean thinking into how they might remap the customer’s journey, reduce the time to resolve, develop slicker processes. We are constantly reducing service level time, resolving issues for customers.”
Roger Clancy has led Telus International Ireland’s integration programme for client partners, systems, processes and tools since September 2019.
He originally joined Voxpro in 2015, playing a key role in the hugely successful growth of the business by 30% year on year, over three years. Voxpro was then 55% acquired by Telus in 2017, who completed the acquisition fully in 2019.
Mr Clancy doesn’t talk about specific customers. Instead, he gives in-house examples of new activities and programmes which grew from ideas put forward by staff members.
For instance, ‘Coffee Roulette’ is a randomly generated one-to-one meeting of two staff members, invariably someone you’ve never met before, perhaps a worker in Ireland chatting with a worker in the Philippines.
A staff member suggested this would be good for team morale and generally good for mental health in a time of social distancing. Staff can also attend or view on playback a regular 30-minute internal meeting to discuss the company’s philosophy and culture.
Telus encourages employee engagement. It also measures this through a global employee engagement survey. Telus self-assess through an annual leadership survey.
Many ideas evolve into in-house programmes. The staff at Telus want to protect local biodiversity. To mark World Bee Day (20 May 2021), Telus installed two hives of up to 60,000 native Irish honey bees at its headquarters in Mahon, Cork.
Telus is keen to engage with its local communities in a variety of ways. Roger Clancy is speaking at Techfest 2021 for it@cork on Thursday, May 27, on the evolution of Telus International Ireland from evolution of a Cork start-up to a leading global digital CX innovator.
He will join it@cork’s impressive panel of speakers, leading Irish-based and international technology leaders. The three-day event, May 25-27, will show how new technology is innovating, transforming and inspiring evolution across all sectors.
Meanwhile, Telus itself had to innovate recently in order to quickly find as many alternative roles as possible for a team of 245 workers in Cork when a contract at Voxpro was not renewed.
Similarly, Telus was also very quick in its response to Covid. More than 1,000 team members shifted to remote working within the first 14 days of Ireland’s initial transition to the social distancing imposed by the pandemic.
“We were among the first companies to fully embrace remote working,” said Roger Clancy. “The ‘can do’ attitude in the DNA of Tellus really helped in our response to Covid. There really have been no negative impacts. We quickly did everything we needed to do in order to protect our own business and our customers.
“We are working with our team to come up with a plan to return to the office when it is safe to do so, but our plan to get back is not in any rush. Our teams and our clients are very happy with how we have adjusted this past year.
“We are now listening to our team members, many of whom tell us that they enjoy working from home. We are looking at how we may best manage working from home as a permanent option where possible. In terms of the talent pipeline, that is where many of the future opportunities lie.”
Mr Clancy says that the current generation is very hungry for personal growth and ongoing education. Telus has a continuously evolving in-house training programme.
Many workers are constantly adding to their skill sets. Many currently have 18 or more different trained specialisations, including executive escalations, social media, API testing and quality control.
“Our team members learn the skills and apply the training on the job,” he said. “The focus is not just themed around work. We also offer training in relation to the environment and ecosystems.
“Allowing people to grow and expand their skills and knowledge is an important part of talent retention. If your team is engaged, your customer will benefit from it.”
Telus International employs a large number number of individuals in Dublin and Cork. If you too are seeking an opportunity to work in these counties, do check out the below jobs at Recruit Ireland:
- PHOTO: Roger Clancy, vice-president of operations and general manager of Telus International Ireland and France, says staff engagement is central to the company’s success in attracting and retaining talent.
