Suntel’s employment opportunities to the region

Suntel, Sri Lanka’s fastest growing telecommunications network which opened a state of the art call centre in Kandy last September, has been a ‘fantastic success’ and a base for employment opportunities.

This has resulted in plans to replicate its success in other parts of the country. The Suntel Call Centre in Kandy was the first such call centre operation to be based out of Colombo and was the first by a fixed line operator in Sri Lanka. The strategic ove sought to harness the professional talent of the Central province and cemented Suntel’s position at the forefront on innovation and service orientation, officials said.

Savanthi Jayawickrema - General Manager Customer Service of Suntel said, “The Kandy Call Centre has been a significant achievement in terms of creating suitable job opportunities for young professionals resident in Kandy – allowing them to seek gainful employment within a learning culture while continuing to live in their hometown.”

The Kandy Call Centre employs state-of-the-art call centre operating systems while the company has consistently added sophisticated facilities to enable ease of use and better service to customers. The Suntel interactive Voice Response system has seen a steady growth in the number of consumers who use the service – an indication of the convenience, user friendliness and easy navigation it provides.

Officials said the Call Centre was opened with the intention of exposing the town’s youth to the telecommunication industry and its developing trends. Having taken into account the number of leading schools in Kandy, Suntel’s aim was to provide the cream of talent emerging from these institutions a career opportunity within their hometown. Suntel plans to expand its call centre operations into other parts of the country in its long term goal whilst contributing towards the economic growth of the country by providing employment opportunities to the youth.

Officials say the company recruits employees of several profiles into the Call Centre – Supervisors and Team Leaders, Trainee Customer Service Executives and Trainee Tele-collection executives and Part Time employees.

The operational management is handled by supervisors and team leaders, who are experienced staff with vast exposure to customer contact services. Trainees comprise mainly of school leavers between the ages 19 to 21, with no previous work experience who are trained and developed to handle the responsibilities of their function.

The Part Time staff consists of students engaged in higher studies enabling them to balance their work hours with their academic schedule. “Yet another segment Suntel plans to capture is that of skilled and qualified young mothers with an interest to work part time while their children are in school,” one official explained.

Suntel has upgraded facilities available to the Call Centre Staff and is now in the process of implementing a work force management system to improve the efficiency of the centre.

The system will provide the agents a better working environment enabling them to see their work schedules in advance, do swaps on line, etc. The call centre also plans to implement an e-learning system to improve the quality of service.Suntel is a joint venture Company that brings together the resources and expertise of Swedish telecom giant overseas Telecom AB, Metrocorp (Pvt.) Ltd. Townsend Limited of Hong Kong, the National Development Bank, and the International Finance Corporation (IFC) – a member of the World Bank Group.