UK Customer Experience Awards – Directors Blog
CCA Wales Celebrates our 1 year in Cardiff – If you haven’t tried us yet; here are 5 reasons why you should:
I’ll go on to expand on these points below but for those hiring managers/internal recruiters who have a million and one things still to do today; here’s the short version.
1 – We are true specialists.
We operate in one industry only which is contact centres.. and we know it really well!
2 – We headhunt.
Headhunting can be a very time consuming and detailed process, we already have a great database of those ‘passive candidates’ who are waiting for just the right opportunity.
3 – Our quality standards are extremely high.
Our team of consultants have all come from contact centre backgrounds including internal recruitment. We are used to being fully answerable to hiring managers and needing to be able to justify why we’ve submitted each candidate.
4 – We’re honest.
We don’t overpromise and if there’s something we don’t feel confident on, we’re brave enough to communicate this with our clients.
5 – We have something to prove.
We’re still new in South Wales and every business who gives us a chance is an opportunity for us to impress!
The 10th of April marks a special day for CCA Recruitment Group as we celebrate one year since opening up our 4th UK branch in central Cardiff. Having been established in 1999; then known as Call Centre Associates, we’ve been able to support clients and candidates in the contact centre space right across the UK. We started up in London and have grown fantastically with the addition of offices in Manchester, Glasgow and most recently; Cardiff.
Having been here for a year now, we’ve doubled in size, we’ve attended (and sponsored) our first Welsh Contact Centre Awards, are proud members of the Welsh Contact Centre Forum and we are already looking forward to what the next 12 months brings in this great community.
One of the key observations we’ve made this year has been around the overall ‘culture’ of Wales. Speaking generally, it’s a place where loyalty is highly valued, friendships and business relationships often intertwine and recommendations are everything. Coming into a new market we were extremely nervous of how we’d be received and worried that we’d be seen as ‘outsiders’ but we couldn’t have been more wrong. We’ve been welcomed with open arms and as we continue to prove ourselves, our client base here in Wales continues to grow.
We came to Cardiff as we saw a real opportunity to be able to service contact centres across Wales and the South West in a truly specialist fashion. Cardiff already has a great network of local agencies supporting businesses on their frontline and advisor requirements with client relationships spanning over years. What CCA came to do was to support the market in different areas; namely senior and niche hires.
We have two clearly defined divisions; one to cover our BPO clients and the other to cover our client-side relationships. Both divisions have spent time refining how we work with our clients. It used to be that hiring managers would come out directly to engage with agencies and that was that. Nowadays the internal recruitment and HR teams play a huge part in agency engagement and although the extent of this differs from business to business, we understand how important it is to work in harmony with their processes.
Our director Jo Griffiths has an impressive background spanning some 15 years working exclusively with clients in the BPO space. With a category in the Welsh Contact Centre awards being ‘Outsourced Contact Centre of the year’, there’s clearly a great network of BPOs in Wales and what Jo and her team can bring is the knowledge of how differently a BPO operates in comparison to your typical contact centre. Bid Managers, Solutions Architects, Account Directors, Business Development Directors – you need to know what you’re looking for and have a good network and that’s what our BPO team can bring to the table.
In our client side division, each consultant comes from a contact centre background themselves; we have a strong understanding of these environments reaching further than just advisors and team leaders. We ate lunch with the business analysts, we sat alongside the quality management team, we went through the ad hoc training as per the newest FCA change and we saw from the inside, the far-reaching consequences that can come from the ‘wrong hire’. We have incredibly high quality standards and aim to work as an extension of internal recruitment teams, not their competition.
It’s this background that helps us to successfully support businesses on those ‘harder to fill roles’. Examples of our successful placements in the past year include:
- Account Director
- Call Centre Trainer
- Head of Operations
- Bid Manager
- Team Leader
- Customer Experience Improvement Specialist
- Senior Client Services Manager
- Resource Planning Specialist
We’ve had a great year and interestingly, when we’ve looked back, over 80% of the roles we’ve filled have been from headhunting as opposed to searching the job boards or advert response. It’s fairly common that because of the level we’re recruiting for, the roles are strictly confidential so ‘passive candidates’ have made up our key candidate pool.
We have actively supported in a market that has had some low moments this year. The closure of both the Barclays and Tesco contact centres saw over 2000 contact centre jobs lost and we attended recruitment drives for both businesses. By continuing to attend the Welsh Contact Centre Forum events, we hope to become even more involved with the local marketplace over the next 12 months. In the meantime, if you’re interested in a conversation about how CCA Recruitment could support your business, please reach out to one of our team.
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