Sitel has restructured its sales team, in August last year it centralized its sales team and hired a head of commercial activity who is involved in all major contracts. At the moment Sitel has 83 account managers excluding a five person sales team in the U.K. whose remit is to fill 1-10 seat excess capacity in centers. Revenue growth from new business last year was offset to an extent by Sitel’s exit from unprofitable contracts, specifically in the domestic Colombian market. A previous commission structure for sales executives which is dependent on contract margin is once again being introduced in a further effort to boost profitability.

Sitel has split its sales team into two distinct groups:

• A business development team: main aim to sign new logos with a specific geographic and vertical focus
• Relationship management team (farmers): these sit in on the client’s operational meetings and work in a consultative role in order to both improve service delivery and drive higher margin sales.

Primary regions targeted, specifically due to higher margin potential, are the U.S, Australia, New Zealand, the U.K and Germany. Secondary regions of focus include Brazil and LATAM with the rest of EMEA simply aimed at maintenance of current volumes. Germany is mainly being served onshore although nearshore support from Serbia and Bulgaria is growing in popularity.

Following on from the sales restructuring program, current sales priorities, in descending order of importance, include:

1.      Expansion of existing business into open capacity in centers and WAHA (U.S.)

2.      New logo business into open capacity and WAHA (U.S.)

3.      Enter into new sites only in most profitable regions and engagements

4.      Create dedicated sites for multi-year engagements.

Sitel is driving its WAHA offerings. Currently the majority of WAH agents are based in the U.S, with a few agents in Canada and the U.K. Towards the end of 2013 Sitel is increasing WAHA delivery in the U.K. and Germany. Sitel piloted its WAHA model in 2008 with 50 FTEs this then increased to 600 FTEs in 2012 and currently Sitel has 1,100 FTE equivalents providing WAH services.

Sitel’s initial WAHA model was named Secure Plus and was solely a hub and spoke delivery model. Sitel noticed unfavorable NPS levels off this model mainly due to incorrect profiling of hires and migration of previously exemplary in center agents to a WAH who then didn’t deliver in this model.

Sitel is now restructuring and renaming its WAHA model to Secure, this will be a fully virtual model. Sitel is also changing its profiling of WAHA hires to agents of 35 years plus, college educated with at least ten years of industry specific knowledge. The aim of this is to offer WAHA as a premium offering with higher NPS levels and conversion rates. According to testimonials by a current emergency services client, this new WAHA structure is proving effective at delivering better NPS levels. Sitel is changing its training of WAH agents to a live video interaction with trainers using Adobe Connect. Secure will have an agent to supervisor ratio of 15:1. By Q4 2013 Sitel aims to have:

• Fully established its Secure WAHA model
• Fully deployed a BYOD model
• Established WAHA operations in Germany.

By 2014 Sitel aims to have:

• Developed and deployed its WAH agent portal

Growing WAHA by ~40% over 2013 figures