Aid apparent

By Dick Hughes  

APRIL 24, 2011 11:48 a.m. (0)

It was a lovely fall Saturday in downtown Greenville Oct. 22.  Shoppers moseyed through the farmers market.  Models strode the runway for Fashion Greenville.

It was a good day to bring a new company to the city.  And, voila, less than six months later, Perceptis’ call center for higher education is here.

It’s up and running as its own corporate headquarters and to “take the friction out of getting services on college campuses”  – fixing a coed’s online password, walking a parent through financial aid and, well, doing whatever one needs, even directions to the football stadium.

The company expects to have 100 employees in Greenville before the end of the year and as many as 200 in the next year or two.  Corporate headquarters have been moved from Cleveland, where a call center remains.

For Bill Bradfield, chief executive officer and founder, the journey to Greenville started with a recommendation from Frontier Capital, the Charlotte company that invested $6 million in Perceptis, according to TMCNet, which tracks developments in call centers.

Bradfield said the investment allows Perceptis to grow the company, including paying for the “showcase” Greenville center to meet expectations of higher education’s “intellectually bright end-user” community.

“We were looking for locations and the Frontier guys had a relationship with South Carolina government and said, ‘why don’t you look at Greenville and other towns in South Carolina,’” said Bradfield.

With that, Bradfield, his wife Candi; Russ Seiter, vice president of client services, and his wife Rhonda, and Ed Tota, vice president of business development, and his wife Amber spent the weekend in Greenville.

“The city of Greenville, the state, the GADC (Greenville Area Development Corp.), the Upstate Alliance all got together and rolled out the red carpet for us.  It was a wonderful experience. Our wives went to the spa while we looked around.  We took a walking tour of the city and learned the history of it.  We got a culinary tour.  There was a big street festival. It was perfect.”

Every other city on their site-tour of North and South Carolina “had to live up to” Greenville.  None did.

Greenville was where they would plant build new corporate offices and a call center unlike the industrial warehousing atmosphere typical of call centers “selling silver dollars and Amish fireplaces.”

In November, Bradfield began negotiating space in the First Citizens building at 325 W. McBee St., one of seven buildings they inspected on their weekend visit.

It was a perfect fit because it looks like a building one would find on a college campus “and we are in that business,” is close to Main Street for its amenities but enough “off the beaten path” to have free parking for employees, which was a major factor in the decision.

In January, Bradfield leased 12,000 square feet on the third floor, “and in 62 days from signing to having it built out we’re in production now, just a little short of furniture,” he said in an interview from a bare office, even as agents were on phones at work stations and new hires were getting prepped in a training room.

He said tax breaks and other incentives Perceptis received “are great, but what was more important to me was the depth of the relationship that we have been able to build with the city, the GADC, the Upstate Alliance.  The people we deal with have been a partner to us.”

Bradford set out to build “a place where we were comfortable bringing clients and feel that sense of confidence about our ability to deliver.  The idea here is that it becomes a hive of activity.  We’re going to manage our home agents and our other call centers from this center.”

When the company was founded in 2004 with a seed contract from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Bradfield said, “we made a commitment that we would never move jobs offshore” where so many call centers have been outsourced for cheap labor.

Another commitment was to create regional centers as close as possible to their customers and “not to move jobs or people out of areas.”

A third goal, he said, is to employ a hybrid of people who work in call centers and people who “work from home. What we wanted is to have people who are physically challenged or traditional stay-at-home moms.”   About half the company’s phone agents work from home.

Call center agents are paid $11-$18 per hour and have “health care, vision, dental insurance.  We cover half of that. It’s almost unheard of in the market.”  A 401-K is in the works.

Bradford said while paying domestic wages and offering benefits is more costly than taking the work to cheap labor markets overseas, it keeps costs down by reducing turnover and improves the quality of service.

“Most call centers experience extraordinary turnover, 50, 60, 70 percent a year, so they have training costs, the cost of recruiting.  By nature of the compensation package and because we think we offer a nice place to work, our turnover is extraordinarily low, generally 10 percent a year. That keeps costs down.”

“The unintended consequence is that our agents tend to be a little older so you have people working for both money and health care.  It gives us a level of maturity on the service desk that pays benefits to us and our customers.”

In seven and a half years and without a single sales representative, Perceptis grew from that one university customer in Ohio to 120, almost all colleges and universities and few companies that service higher education such as CSI, an IT company based in Easley and which wired Perceptis’ Greenville office.  Bob Jones University signed up this month.

Bradfield said that with the additional capital provided by Frontier the company is “staking out a position of leadership in the marketplace” against its two competitors, Blackboard and SunGard, both large public companies with call-center divisions.

“We are the only independent one, and we think that is an advantage, along with our good service record,” Bradfield said. “We’ve been profitable for a long time.  We are meeting expectations and now, for the first time because of our relationship with Frontier Capital, we are making big investments in what we are doing.  And this showcase center is one of them.”