Partner of the Month: Sutherland Global Services, Inc.
by Paul Catiang

When international BPO Sutherland was required by its client to set up shop in the Philippines, the first company they approached for consultation was John Clements Consultants, Inc. “When you talk of the Philippines and talk of reputed recruitment specialists who have been in the market for a long enough time, then obviously the name of John Clements comes top of the list of whom to call,” says K.S. Kumar, Vice President of India Operations, who has come to Manila to set up shop. “So we were referred by people saying John Clements has a very good track record.”

“We’re in different parts of the world,” he continues. “We’re in Canada, we’re in India, and several other countries. So for our clients, we go where they want us to go. Our client wants us to be in the Philippines right now, so we of course expand here.” And moving here holds a lot of prospects for a company that has been in the BPO industry for 19 years. Mr. Kumar proclaims, “we’re looking to go forward here and expand to three thousand seats in a year and a half to two years.”

Tom Stuewe, Senior Vice President for Service Delivery, concurs. “The short-term goal is about a thousand seats by December, and then that will be a combination of Manila and probably one other geography in the Philippines.” Because of the wide range of clients Sutherland services, their executives are confident about serving their clientele here. “Certainly, that will be for the accommodation of new clients and existing clients, but we’ll primarily serve the new clients that we’ll be bringing over here,” Mr. Stuewe explains. “It’s quite simple to leverage the strengths that exist here in the Philippines as a geography from a labor market standpoint and from a skills and experiences standpoint.” The skills Filipinos have will allow Sutherland to offer services like customer-service programs, maybe some low-level technical support and account-management programs.

This promising endeavor is the result of a close working relationship with John Clements, which provided Sutherland with their human resources needs. As Mr. Stuewe relates, “I’ve been very, very pleased with the responsiveness of everybody from Carol [Dominguez] on down. I think that the organization is very similar to Sutherland culturally. They are a very performance-driven organization, a very results- and goal-oriented company, and they treat their clients much like the way we treat ours, which is ‘let’s roll up our sleeves and get it done.’ That’s the same kind of treatment that I’ve seen from just about every single person that I’ve seen at John Clements. I’ve worked with Carol directly; I’ve worked with Mario [Biscocho]; I’ve worked with a few other people over there. I think that to a person they’ve been very, very accommodating, responsive, and they have really acted more as a consultant as opposed to an outsourced recruitment vendor. As we brought additional needs to the table, like payroll, medical coverage, license-type issues, they’re very responsive with coming back to us with a solution, unlike some of the other companies here.”

To serve their initial client, Sutherland approached John Clements for all their human resources needs, and John Clements in turn partnered with FuturePerfect for the training of Sutherland’s agents in British English. As clients serving other cultures and technical interests come in, Sutherland aims to be thorough in the continued training of its agents, Tom Stuewe says. Given the prospect-rich future Sutherland envisions in the Philippines, and the effort channeled into tapping these prospects, the success of their endeavors here is all but assured.

www.suth.com