MONTEGO BAY, St James — A new, admittedly much smaller than usual, player has entered the Jamaican outsourcing market and while they have just one client currently, there are plans for serious growth in the near future.

SynchroSource Offshore Solutions (SOS), which started operations late last year, was officially launched in Montego Bay recently at its cosy offices on Fort Street, just off the busy downtown area.

SynchroSource is now taking inbound order entry calls for Pizza-Pizza, the largest pizza restaurant in Canada with over 700 locations nationwide.

Omar Massey, the call centre manager said at the launch “Until recently these calls were managed by agents in Canada,” and added that presently they were working “Thursdays to Sundays in the afternoon, starting at 4:00 pm”

At present, SynchroSource has seven staff members and 15 workstations, but there are plans according to founder and Managing Director Debra Fraser to acquire additional space to accommodate a workforce they hope to grow to 75 by the end of the year.

Massey, who worked with Fraser at another outsourcing centre with head offices overseas, reported that their “client is impressed with the rate we have learned their system and the quality of calls” and said the scope for growth was tremendous as in a few months they would be taking calls seven days a week and working up to 14 hours a day.

The culture at SynchroSource Massey said was one that “acknowledge and reward hard work, commitment and dedication to the vision of the company” and said the “Highly trained staff (had a) lot of call centre experience,” and was “humorous and lively bunch and proficient in their job.”

Fraser who was born in Canada to Jamaican parents and who has lived here for more than 10 years said the idea behind the company was to make it easier for overseas companies “who are coming to the Caribbean offshore market to operate contact centres, to do so seamlessly and with minimal investment risk.”

With the investment group made up of entirely Canadians at this time, she said the idea was to “Target Canada business and the many opportunities for us to provide remote teams or remote services for Canadian businesses and it is our intention to do so successfully in the days to come.”

She also spoke about the synergies of having a Canadian investment group and going after companies from the North American country.

The name of the company she explained came out of the basic role of the company, which was to assist to synchronise and outsource work for the overseas companies, “By them coming here to use our offices and equipment, our supervisory team, our managers and our people we can make it very easy for them to synchronise their efforts in Jamaica.”

Inter-net technology Fraser said had caused the world to “become a very, very flat place, and a company that wishes to build a customer service or sales team of say 10 telephone agents or anywhere between five and 10, they can recruit from anywhere in the world and companies are taking advantage of that because if they don’t, their competitors will and if their competitors do, they have to follow suit”.

This she said has led to “A mad rush to build remote offices all over the globe where they can find staff who can do the work and do it more efficiently so their costs are lower and that’s basically what is under girding this fast growing business of off-sourcing”.

It is not easy she said due to the cost of setting up the business as well as “Tapping into those markets can be a very difficult and risky task”.

The experience of having worked with overseas-based companies that have tried to set up offices here she said “it is full of risks and potholes and that is where the idea of SynchroSource came from, how can we make it much easier for them to come here and find the staff they want to get operational very quickly without having to overspend or make mistakes and just to learn the environment which takes a lot of time so we are here to help them to do so”.

The aims of SynchroSource are three fold she said, “Creating quality jobs locally, provide value to customers and to do so in a profitable manner.”

Creating quality jobs is what “drives our business — key performance measures — how many jobs we can create,” she went on to explain and said unless the job provided “both learning and rewards in an encouraging environment — if you lose hold of any three, it’s not really a good job.”

Fraser said both herself and Massey had been offered jobs in other companies since leaving their former employers but “we passed them on as we did not think they were good for the community or the environment”.

SynchroSource has also partnered with the Montego Bay based Youth Enhancement Services (YES) programme and according to Massey “will be offering work experience to grads on a regular basis, the goal is to provide jobs to young people who have taken the initiative to become trained in customer service and at the completion of that we hope to employ some of them”.