Merchants, southern Africa’s largest and oldest business process outsourcing (BPO) and customer experience specialist, has won two categories in the 2014 BPeSA Annual Contact Centre and BPO Awards.
The awards which aim to recognise outstanding performance and contact centre excellence within the industry, were announced at a gala event on Saturday at the Cape Town International Convention Centre.
The BPeSA awards covers both individual and industry categories, providing a credible platform for talent and innovation to be showcased and celebrated.
Loyiso Malindi, an agent in the Merchants ASDA contact centre in Cape Town won the 2014 Agent of the Year category. This category awards individual agents based on their performance during the course of the year. ASDA, the UK’s second largest retailer, is one of South Africa’s longest standing off-shored contact centres having first set up their contact centre in Cape Town in 2005 through their outsourcing relationship with Merchants. The centre provides customer service support for on-line Asda customers in the areas of Grocery Home Shopping delivery and the Direct.com website offering clothing and non-grocery products.
Malindi joined the ASDA contact centre sales team in 2009 and has since been involved in other departments such as ASDA Direct Service, ASDA Flowers, ASDA Direct Support and ASDA Direct Incident Management teams. He has shown consistent high levels of performance, achieving high KPI levels.
“Loyiso goes above and beyond the call of duty every single day. He actively looks to take ownership of customer queries not only resolving this but looking for the root cause and working with our support teams to ensure the issue does not happen again,” says Carrie Hitchings, business unit head at the Merchants ASDA contact centre.
“He has such a high level of knowledge and understanding of the business proposition, he is the go to guy for everyone. His passion and enthusiasm is the same every single day, even our client acknowledges his attitude and quality of work on a monthly basis.”
Merchants, a division of Dimension Data, was also named winner in the 2014 Skills Development Award. This award recognises organisations that have invested in developing the skills of their agents and leadership teams.
Merchants is committed to the ongoing investment in skills development initiatives within the organisation. This includes client-specific induction training of agents as well as continuous refresher training to ensure that they retain their knowledge and skills, foundational leadership and business skills training and a comprehensive management development programme, developed in partnership with the University of Stellenbosch.
Merchants also partners with Dimension Data on their Fast Track programme which is run in conjunction with the IE Business School, and is a contributor to the Dimension Data Grad Program.
Merchants runs a series of development programmes aimed specifically at agents who are interested in furthering their careers within the organisation called Future Leaders.
A key element of Merchants Skills Development Programs is the investment in youth development. Merchants partners with Harambee to provide opportunities for young people to enter the world of work.
“At Merchants, skills development is driven by our strategic goals that include putting our people and customers first, creating sustainable and meaningful futures for our people, and creating easy, positive and brilliant customer experiences. With these key drivers in mind, we are committed to ensuring the continuous development and progression of our people so that they are able to create meaningful and impactful futures for themselves and their families,” says Jennifer Algie, People director at Merchants.