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Suzanne Sitherwood’s Flat World

The Head of Atlanta Gas Light Talks to VEENA RAO About Outsourcing to India

Suzanne Sitherwood, the energetic president of Atlanta Gas Light and two other utilities of the Atlanta based AGL Resources, has India on her mind these days. India is attracting more outsourcing companies nowadays specially with broadband service. Back from two trips to India, where the AGL group, a diversified energy company, recently outsourced its customer care service, Sitherwood is animated about the new addition to the AGL employee base. 

“We treat our call-center workers as employees, and not as contractors,” she says. “So we wanted our business associates to meet our executive team, and be part of our company. 

Even though they are receiving their checks from the corporation they work for, they are really working for our customers.”

The call-center is outsourced to Wipro, and is based in Pune.

AGL Resources serves 2.2 million customers in six states through its utility subsidiaries - Atlanta Gas Light, Elizabethtown Gas in New Jersey, Virginia Natural Gas, Florida City Gas, Chattanooga Gas, and Elkton Gas in Maryland. Ranked by Forbes as one of the 10 Best Managed Utilities, AGL Resources reported revenue of $2.7 billion and net income of $193 million in 2005. As a 70 percent owner in the SouthStar partnership, AGL Resources markets natural gas to consumers in Georgia under the Georgia Natural Gas brand. 

Presently, AGL has gone live with its Georgia, Tennessee and half of its Virginia utilities. The other utilities are scheduled to follow suit in February. 

Top: AGL's executive team with the call center reps in Pune. Bottom: Wipro's Pune facility.

Sitherwood presides over Atlanta Gas Light, Chattanooga Gas and Florida City Gas and has been in the company 26 years. In a growing flat world, she says, the decision to outsource was to be able to provide a higher level of service to its customers.

“Management issues change year to year,” she says. “I remember a time when even the question of outsourcing was questionable. Then technology came along and changed the work force dramatically. Now, outsourcing offshore is something new, although the Fortune 20 companies have been doing it for a while. It is newer to midsized companies like ours. Five to seven years from now, people won’t think a lot about it.”

She says, the company had to cut down on jobs here, but it was over a long period of time, and mostly involved temporary workers whose turnover was high. As a company dealing with natural gas, some jobs like leak calls remain here, because of safety issues.

Sitherwood is eloquent about AGL’s outsourcing program.

“If you speak to the center reps (in Pune) they will tell you that they’ve not participated in a more robust program ever. We felt that investment in strong training would be a benefit to our customers.”

This involved a stringent screening process where 70 workers were identified. This number was then brought down to 45, and eventually will be brought down to 35. The reps spent hours studying AGL’s vertical, the energy industry, understanding its customers and geography and product etc. 

“During our last trip, we spent a week in Pune, training the team members on technology, process, industry and quality expectations,” she says. Six trainers formed part of the team.

Part of the extensive training also involved voice training. “There is a lot of conversation about voice neutralization,” she says. “The English that our call center reps speak is more British. Part of the extensive training involved making sure that they have an understanding of American English; how words and pronunciations, vary. What was important is the ability to understand the voice. It is not that I don’t want our customers to know that they are speaking to someone in India; it is more about understanding and being able to communicate.” 

Sitherwood says this was a little bit of a challenge but not insurmountable.

From the call-center reps’ perspective, Sitherwood says, the biggest challenge is lack of institutional knowledge. “They are in essence starting all new. They have no core group with knowledge of the company, and are perhaps using technology they are not familiar with. There could be some trepidation when they take calls for a few weeks,” she says. “This is normal, whether you are in Atlanta or India.”

To provide them with management support, the company has kept its core group here, to enable reps to call and get coached.

Once the call-center in India has some history with AGL, says Sitherwood, there will be a reward system for employees. The top employees will be given a chance to come here, and then they would go back and be ambassadors.

So the next time an AGL customer calls the company to discuss his gas bill, he will most likely hear an Indian voice in a polished neutral accent. What he will not see is months of training and toil that has gone behind the program.

For Sitherwood and AGL, whose mantra it is to provide higher level of service to customers, the experience has been well worth the effort.


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