MANILA, Philippines - The notion of love is alive and well at C3, a customer communications outsourcer whose customer contact representatives are literally surrounded by love, as the word fills the spaces on the walls and cubicles around them. Figuratively, C3 makes a difference in the information communication technology industry because of its culture of love.
C3’s full name, C3/CustomerContactChannels, spells out its very essence: Customer, which means that C3 is a company that serves the customer above all else, with full intent to resolve issues quickly and do things excellently; Contact, as C3 is an expert in contact center management; and Channels, through which C3 says, for every issue there is an answer.
The same team that founded Precision Response Corporation (PRC) founded C3, turning it into a Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) company providing customer management solution worldwide. The company has opened customer contact centers throughout the Unites States, Asia, Europe and Central America and boasts several Fortune 500 companies as its clients. C3 is backed by Stone Point Capital, a private equity firm that has raised and managed private equity funds with aggregate committed capital of $9 billion.
C3 has become a pioneer in handling multichannel customer care and has created a unique employee-centric culture that is innovative in the contact center industry. C3 prides itself on encouraging everyone in its organization, from management to employees, to suggest new ideas and try new things to make the company better.
C3 has passed the 1,000-employee mark and now has close to 2,000 employees and five accounts. C3 Philippines was organized by a core team of seven people, all of whom are seasoned professionals in the BPO industry. They brought with them a shared history: the key officers worked together for almost 10 years in different contact center industries worldwide.
The Philippines being the number-one call center destination in the world, employing over 600,000 agents and surpassing India’s 350,000, makes it the ideal place to plant the C3 culture of love. The Philippine contact center industry has grown exponentially in the last five years, contributing a staggering $11 billion (5 percent) to the country’s gross domestic product. This growth has spurred a growth in the income levels of contact center agents.
But being paid well is not everything, according to Kevin Urrutia, C3’s vice president for operations. The contact center industry has seen a high attrition rate even if higher salaries and more bonuses are offered. While the industry average of attrition is 10 percent, C3 only has an attrition rate of between three and four percent, a significant indicator of how the culture of love in a workplace can affect employee longevity.
Rick Ferry, CustomerContactChannels president and COO, explains, “The whole theme is to love coming to work in the morning, love where you work, love who you work for, love who you work with; it comes from the old notion that if you love what you do, then you never ‘work’ a day in your life. There’s a great deal of responsibility that goes behind that word and that overall theme; we have to live that every day. Essentially, we want our staff to enjoy what they do and be proud of it.â€
Jill Vivas, senior operations manager and one of the members of the core team, says, “At C3, we have an open-door policy and employees can talk to us anytime. They can bypass their immediate supervisor and talk to any manager. Even the highest officer, our country manager Andy Sarakinis, is available anytime.â€
Jill says she was touched when Andy opened his home to his employees during a string of storms in August last year. Another manager, Chris Cardenas, drove employees from their homes to the C3 building’s training rooms, which were made into temporary shelters for employees and their families. She says she had never heard or experienced such caring from employers before. Things like these make employees fiercely loyal to C3, she observes.