Karl Graham supervises workers at e-Services contact centre at Naggo Head, St Catherine. (Photo: Joseph Wellington)

Patrick Casserly's technology firm, e-Services Ltd is adding 1,600 jobs in Jamaica this year, doubling its workforce and transforming this six-year old contact centre into one of this island's largest employers of labour.

The firm, which is anchored in Montergo Bay has added 300 agents to its payroll during the past six weeks, which took its labour force to 1,700. It has since launched an aggressive recruitment drive for another 1,270. They will join the company by December, bringing the number of persons employed to just under 3,000.

Yesterday, Casserly, in confirming the developments, pointed out that the expansion in Jamaica was taking place on parallel tracks with the investments in St Lucia, where some 120 workers were being trained as part of a 240 strong team being recruited for the operation in the tiny island.

e-Service employees using computers to address customer queries. (Photo: Joseph Wellington)

"We have hired 300 in the past six weeks, and will be employing 1,270 more by the end of December to double current employment in Jamaica," Casserly, e-Services' CEO and capital partner told the Business Observer.

Most of the new jobs are being created in Kingston and at Naggo Head in St Catherine, rather than at e-Services' main centre at Bogue, in Montego Bay where the vast majority of the workers are currently located.

Casserly said yesterday that the expansion was being driven by a combination of organic growth, and the addition of new clients to his company's portfolio. E-Services now has 14 customers - mostly household name Fortune 1,000
American firms like Phillips and Delta Airlines.

Patrick Casserly

e-Services was now holding discussions with four Fortune 500 companies to win their businesses, Casserly said.

Currently, the contact centre operates out of 173,000 square feet of office space across all its locations in Montego Bay and Naggo Head where it now has 300 seats, and is creating capacity for an additional 300 to accommodate the expanded workforce.

However, by Casserly's calculation, another 30,000 square feet of open space under a single roof will be required in Kingston over the next few months, in order for e-Services to house the new workers.

"We have had proposals for offices that have 10,000 square feet and so on," said Casserly. "But that is not suitable. What we will need is 30,000 square feet of open plan space in Kingston."

Two years ago, Cassserly made a bid for the government-owned, 55,000 square foot Oxford Manor building on Oxford Road in Kingston, to house the workers that he had from then anticipated that his firm would need to drive its expansion. But last year, that building was sold to another government agency - the Planning Institute of Jamaica - for $250-million, the same price that Casserly had offered.
The PIOJ is yet to move into the building.

Casserly said he was now on the hunt for suitable real estate in Kingston, and that lease was one of the options being explored.

e-Services, through its success in creating a template for this type of operation, has been credited with placing Jamaica on the map as a jurisdiction for contact centres - an industry in which inquiries made from anywhere in the globe to client companies, are routed to and processed by workers sitting in front of a computer screen in Montego Bay or Naggo Head.

"Jamaica has become a destination for this industry," declared Casserly. "We feel that we have played a major role in this process."

It takes six to eight weeks for e-Services to train each recruit - usually high school graduates with an aptitude for computers, and strong sense of focus.

"Everybody goes through six to eight weeks of training before you start servicing any of the lines of business," explained Casserly. "When people are in training they get $4,500 per week. They get an additional $500 per week once they graduate."

Casserly attributes e-Services' success in wooing Fortune 500 contracts to Jamaica, and keeping them here, in part to the work structure and incentive-driven remuneration at his company. He pointed out for example, that for every 15 agents employed, there was one supervisor; one manager for every 14 supervisors; and, for every 20 agents, one quality analyst.

"In our business we score quality every week," he said. "We take sample of data entry or telephone calls, because part of salary is based on the quality of the work."

However, this process of quality control and maintaining Jamaica at the cutting edge of this expanding industry, begins with the recruitment - where only those would-be employees with minimum 85 per cent accurate scores are accepted for training.

But Casserly told the Business Observer that labour shortage was now emerging as a major challenge in the process of expansion. "Because of the shortage of this kind of labour in Montego Bay, we are starting a school at the company for people in MoBay who score between 74 and 80 to train them, to see if they can pass our exam," he said.

Another of the business ethos to which Casserly attributes the growth of e-Services is the opportunity that he says the company creates for employees to move up the management ranks.

"Three members of management committee started as agents five years ago," he noted. "That's like starting as a teller and being a branch manager in five years. The strength of the company is from internal development - people who grow with us and see their future with this organisation."

In 2004, Casserly was named Business Leader for the year 2003. He was nominated and selected for his role in e-Services' success in pioneering and developing the call contact industry in Jamaica.

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