CBN:
Entrepreneur Nikki Hendricks (photo) is a success story in the Western Cape call centre industry. In 2 years, she has grown her business OC2 from a 15-seat start-up to a financially stable 60-seat operation serving blue-chip clients in the financial services and health care industries.
Hendricks credits the company’s success to strong values and intensive investment in its people. ‘We do all our own training and we’re very proud of the way we have enabled people to grow and develop their skills,’ she says. ‘We have very low staff turnover - we rarely lose people to poaching - and we’ve developed a learning culture in which everyone is open to challenge and is ready to learn from it.’
The company’s training emphasises vision and values: ‘Teaching the processes and procedures is easy,’ says Hendricks. ‘Buying into our values is what makes or breaks a person in this company; it translates directly into their operational performance.’
OC2’s values, which include ‘integrity in all we do’ and ‘owning it as though it were our own’, were 1st put to the test when Hendricks and her colleagues discovered that an employee on a research project had not stuck to the protocol, making a 6th of the sample sub-standard. The team decided to redo that portion of the research at their own expense.
‘The client would never have known there was a problem if we hadn’t told them,’ she says. ‘It was a tough decision to make because we were really broke at the time and it cost us money, but we followed our values and it paid off. Not only did we sleep better, but that client has become our best reference.’
Hendricks and her partners Andrew Honiball and Anthea Mead have funded OC2 entirely from their own pockets and from revenues, making for an anxious but immensely satisfying start-up phase. ‘It’s an amazing feeling to know that we have built something out of nothing with our own hands. We started with nothing, working out of one room; now we’ve expanded to fill two floors of a building.’
As a black-owned company, OC2 is also an important contributor to the empowerment of the industry in the Western Cape. ‘It’s absolutely crucial that we have successful black entrepreneurs in the call centre industry and we’re delighted to see companies like OC2 taking off,’ comments Luke Mills of Calling the Cape. ‘This is an intensely competitive industry and it’s very, very hard for entrepreneurial businesses to carve out space for themselves. OC2 is not just surviving, they’re showing some of their bigger competitors how it’s done.’
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