Three’s 450 customer facing call centre staff are to be transferred to Capita in a move Three hopes will “give customers the best possible experience."
The news comes despite Three achieving some of the best scores in Ofcom’s quarterly complaints reporting, with three complaints per 100,000 customers compared to Vodafone’s 29 per 100,000.
Gurpreet Gujral, director of contact centres at Three, said: ‘We are committed to giving our customers the best possible experience. We believe appointing a specialist customer services partner for some of our customer service operations in Glasgow is the best way of achieving that goal.”
‘We will now work hard to ensure all employees affected by this change are fully supported and we have already begun a process of consultation with them.’
Feel at home, abroad
However some staff affected by the move strongly disagreed, telling Mobile that managers were neither warned nor consulted about the decision and that the senior management team were booed and shouted at by the staff in attendance.
The move means no customer facing call centre staff now work for three, with their other contact centres in India also run by a third party. While the deal is yet to be finalised, the changeover is expected to take place early next year and could include staff moving to another office within Glasgow.
The terms of employment for those currently working in affected roles are to be safeguarded for 12 months, though after this point any changes are to be made by Capita, not Three.
Capita specialises in technology-enabled outsourcing and also manage some of O2 and Tesco Mobile’s call centres. The company has benefited from the outsourcing of government contracts and was recently embroiled in an NHS scandal following their “unacceptable” service performance in relation to the primary care support services they provide to GPs.
