Conduit is Ireland’s largest call centre company and chief executive Denis Creighton is growing the company’s outsourced customer care activity

Conduit is one of the more celebrated Irish fast growing company stories of the past decade. The mid-1990’s brainchild of Liam Young, since last year Conduit has been in the embrace of InfoNXX, an American multinational. Young departed in 2006 after selling his interest and now in charge is Denis Creighton, 43, a telecoms professional who joining Conduit six years ago from Eircom.

Conduit is best known for its 11850 directory assistance service but outsourced customer care now accounts for 50% of Conduit’s turnover and is the activity with most growth potential. Conduit employs 750 people, many of them students, at its East Point bas in the northside of Dublin.

A few years ago conventional wisdom had it that such call centre’s didn’t have a future in Ireland, because it was cheaper to do the same thing in India. But the reality turned out to be different to the theory. According to Creighton: “Initially there were huge savings on payroll cost. But is soon emerged that companies had underestimated the complexity surrounding the telecoms infrastructure. There were also major cultural issues. Diction you could work on, though training programmes would be two or three times longer than over here. But things we take for granted, in terms of local knowledge, you just couldn’t teach.”

Conduit’s biggest customer is Vodafone. Conduit started out doing the mobile giant’s directory assistance calls and leveraged off that to handle Vodafone’s customer care issues too. Conduit which also has a call centre in Wales, has 600 ‘seats’ handling the Vodafone business. Conduit biggest Irish customer is Bord Gais, on whose behalf Conduit deals with accounts and inquiries, runs outbound sakes promotions, schedules appointments for installers and even deals with house-builders about gas connections. Conduit also has a contract with Tourism Ireland to handle consumer inquiries from across Europe and Creighton sees other public sector agencies as an important source of growth.

He said: “The public sector has been slow to move towards outsourced customer care, even though there are well documented benefits in terms of cost reduction and improved quality of service. It’s not always about phone calls either. For instance we did some work with Aer Lingus at a stage when the airline was struggling to cope with e-mail inquiries. We were able to develop a solution that automated the response to 80% of the inquiries.” Creighton’s strategy to win business is to persuade prospective customers to give Conduit a small slice of work to begin with. “We can prove the concept by taking on overflow business, for instance. So we say, ‘give us a trial for three months on this segment, let us manage it for you and get back to you’. It’s almost like a piece of research. That tends to be successful for us”.