AFTER years of first being told by a mutual acquaintance to interview Yoni Epstein, I had finally got around to it, mainly to document the journey of a Jamaican business process outsourcing (BPO) company, 10 years into existence and which has undergone more than one name change in that short time.

Now as I look as we meet, his easy gait and relaxed dress summed up the atmosphere we were in at the itel centre on the shoreline of the Montego Freeport in St James. After a brief introduction, we got to the business at hand. The itel story is about a home-grown BPO entity that began 10 years ago and is now in nine countries with 6,000 employees managing the accounts of some of the world’s biggest companies.

“I got into the business when I was in college originally. I was working for Unique Vacations [overseas] as a reservation agent for the Sandals Group. Then in 2004, Adam Stewart said Unique was to set up a call centre in Jamaica and asked me to move back home to work in the centre. So I ran that centre from 2004 to 2012,” Epstein said as he reflected on the genesis of the idea which led him to start itel.

Unique Vacations is a reserve agency for the Sandals Group. Its chairman, Adam Stewart, is also the executive chairman of the ATL Group of which the Jamaica Observer is a member.

Epstein said shortly after managing the Jamaica arm of Unique Vacations, he was appointed the overall director for the company’s centres across the global – Jamaica, St Lucia, Miami, Canada, and the UK.

He said while doing that job, he observed that the call centre industry had a lot more potential than was being exploited. And so with an entrepreneurial mindset, he set out to build his own company in the call centre business and that’s how itel was started in June 2012. The business started then as Island Outsourcers. A year into running the business, Epstein said he reckoned that Island Outsourcers didn’t sound like an international brand in a market where he was going up against established entities with deep ties in the call centre business. That led to a name change to itelBPO, which, he said, “sounded more international.” Epstein shared that the word ‘outsource’ in the name was dropped, because it had a negative conotation. “Nobody wants to outsource, they don’t want to use the term.” The word island was also dropped because it sounded “too relaxed” which doesn’t work in that industry. “itelBPO is really ‘island telecom’,” he said with a glint in his eyes which suggests he is proud of the name. As for the word or acronym ‘BPO’, “it comes from business process outsourcing. We drop the BPO part of the name now to just itel, because we as a company, as we continue to evolve, we are more than just BPO,” he offered.

But turning back to the beginning of the company, Epstein continued.

“We started with seven employees in the Montego Bay Free Zone. Dwayne Williams, who is our current CTO (chief technical officer), was our first employee and he’s still here with us,” Epstein said.

Call centres in the early days were mainly set up by foreigners, Epstein was undaunted. “I don’t believe foreigners should be doing everything. I believe in the industry. I believe in the Jamaicans who were working in the industry at the time and I believe that Jamaica was nowhere near achieving its true potential [in this industry].” It was that belief which led him to set up the call centre, but he admits, things were not easy at the beginning.

Epstein had worked in the industry for eight years making bookings for Sandals Resorts International – the hotel group started by the late Gordon “Butch” Stewart in 1981. But that didn’t prepare him for venturing on his own, especially when it came to finding clients.

“I knew how to run it, I knew how to manage people, but I didn’t know how to get the business. That was the biggest hurdle at the time, because one, we are nobody, we are small and its a very big industry led by foreign companies.”

To overcome that hurdle, Epstein said he went to every trade show about the industry he could to get introductions and making investments in people that could potentially bring business and investing into the facilities to make it a place where foreign companies would want to outsource business to rather than to one of the multinationals at the time.

“Over the years as we start to build critical mass in the business and we started to attract clients with good track records, strong brand names, that started to build what itel is and what it meant to the industry, so it began to get a little easier to get business after that.”

But he said the company didn’t stop at there.

“Call centre work is the biggest part of what we do, and it is done with a lot of technology to gain access to businesses mainly in North America and do that in a safe manner, to prevent cybercrimes.” But always looking for new business opportunities, Epstein said he started to diversify his offerings to clients including data garnered from artificial intelligence (AI).

“I have to think, how do I take the data to a next level to provide more value to my customers because I am not here to just take a phone call. What I learn on that phone call is very important to the business, and so I started to think, how do I provide those insights to the business in a more efficient and analytical manner. That’s how AI comes into play. So in many of our transactions, the AI is listening to the phone calls and the AI is providing us with real time data as to what is happening on that call. Not only what our employee is doing from a developmental perspective, but also what is the customer sentiment.”

He said with the AI tech, he is able to answer questions such as “Did the customer like the product? Is there an issue with logistics? Are there hotel rooms that have sold out? Is there an issue customers are having with a particular situation that is causing them to be irate? All of those things are where we bring AI into the mix to understand and provide data as a value-added to the customers.

“What it also does, it helps the agent, because now we have taken training and development platforms that take that data and determine what the agents need to develop faster and better. Because we have all this data, we have teams who are building reports and information on how many phone calls, what’s the average time spent on the calls, what’s the conversion, what’s the quality assurance score. All of this type of data we package and give back to the client; so they can know what is happening at every step of the way.”

For the most part, he said itel trains and employs its agents, many fresh out of high school who may not have been able to afford college.

While he still recalls his first client, he was more focused on what lies ahead for his young company.

“Now I am taking calls for hotels, for airlines, I’m taking calls for telecommunicatiions company and helping people with their light bills (sic), their telephone bills, dealing with health-care questions, providing information to the health-care provider so the customer can get their benefits for medical purposes. So it is truly morphed into eight different industries that we are doing, not just only across voice, but also chats and e-mails.”

From a company which started in Montego Bay in 2012, itel expanded to Freeport, Grand Bahama in 2013, two years before setting up a location in Kingston. Then in 2017 the company moved offices in Montego Bay to its current location. In that same year, itel acquired a company that does purely work-from-home in the US. Then grew into another facility in Kingston, then in 2020 it launched in St Lucia. In 2021, itel bought a new company which brought it into Guyana and Honduras then from there it went into Canada and Colombia late last year.

“The expansion comes from the people you work with and that you hire. I have always watched when I worked with the Sandals Group and see how they operate to be successful,” he said, indicating that he adopted some of the strategies which served him well while he worked for the group.

“For us the next step is continued growth. We are launching a new facility in Kingston this month which will be an 80,000-square-foot facility that is purpose built for call centres.” Epstein contends it will be “the nicest office, the nicest call centre ever built in Jamaica.”

Here in Montego Bay, the layout of the itel campus is relaxing. Each wall decorated with artwork of various kinds, belies the serious work which takes place in each room where agents deal with hundreds of customers each day. During breaks, the workers loiter in rooms prepared just for that, with their bean bag chairs, ping pong tables and various games. An old telephone booth sits in the corner of one room. Our hosts quips if some of the current workers would have known what it is.

“I can tell you that call centres are nice, the culture is different. It’s not the sweat shop you hear about,” Epstein asked. “The biggest asset is the people. If our staff are not happy, they will not do a good job on the telephone and if they don’t do a good job on the telephone, we are going to lose clients. So our number one duty is to take care of the staff. Provide great facilities, great benefits, health insurance, life insurance, provide transportation, food and beverage, a good pay with incentives for doing good jobs, all of those things.”

Looking back he said he has no regrets. “The only regret would be if I didn’t start the business.” He spoke of being proud of employing 6,000 people in nine different countries.

“Think of the biggest brands in North America, name it, they are probably outsourcing and the people here at this company are servicing those companies,” his chief marketing officer, Melissa von Frankenburg chipped in. “You are sitting in Jamaica and getting the experience of a Fortune 500 company.”

“Its not just about coming in an doing customer services and working as an agent. That can be the start. But it means jobs in IT, marketing, human resources, accounting, workforce management, data sciences. So it’s no longer about leaving Jamaica to find a big job in a Fortune 500 company. You can do that in this sector,” von Frankenburg added.

“This is our time, companies are looking nearshore more than anytime. Like having a partner that’s close to home.” For itel, the hope is that the partnership continues as the expansions that are planned.