Contact Centres in West Lothian
The Scottish accent has achieved the highest level of acceptability across a range of accredited surveys and so Scotland has long been the location of choice for contact centre operations.Scotland has over 300 call centres, nearly a third of which offer services in languages other than English. The industry employs more than 60,000 people in Scotland, many in the financial services sector, the Central Belt of Scotland being the second largest financial services centre in the UK outside London, accounting for 8% of Scotland’s GDP. The call centre industry has undergone rapid expansion in the last decade. As customers increasingly rely on telephone based services, the growth continues, and many major call centre operators have found their
Scottish location solutions in West Lothian. The companies operating contact centres in West Lothian represent banking multinationals as well as manufacturing and service industries, and employ over 7,000 people in the area. BSkyB, the leading satellite television provider, is West Lothian’s largest private sector employer with over 3,000 people employed in their Contact and Customer Service Centre, based on Livingston’s Kirkton Campus. Intelligent Finance is a Direct Banking subsidiary that was launched by Halifax Bank in 2000. It has grown rapidly to be one of the UK’s leading direct banking and mortgage providers and employs over 1,000 people at its Livingston based contact centre, also on the town’s Kirkton Campus. HSBC Bank is a major UK clearing bank. HSBC opened its global payments processing centre close to Livingston town centre in 1999, citing the success of its telephone call handling centre on the Edinburgh Business Park, the quality of the local people and the availability of new premises amongst its reasons for choosing West Lothian. The Inland Revenue located a major new contact centre at the Pyramids Business Centre in Bathgate in 2004. The centre, which is conveniently located at Junction 3 of the M8 motorway between Edinburgh and Glasgow, employs over 600 staff who provide advice and guidance to customers about the Inland Revenue’s Tax Credit schemes. Scottish Courage is a global brewing giant that made the decision to locate their business contact centre in West Lothian in 2002. Their First Point Contact Centre, located at Livingston’s Deer Park Business Campus, employs around 300 highly skilled staff who process more than 40,000 calls each week, providing customer services to 30,000 Scottish Courage business customers in the UK. Scottish Courage also focus their Scottish distribution operations in West Lothian, based at the state of the art distribution centre J4M8. Quintiles Transnational is a global biotechnology company with a strong manufacturing presence and multi-lingual contact centre in West Lothian. A number of their operations were recently acquired by Aptuit Inc., an emerging company focused on streamlining and supporting the early drug development process. Iron Mountain, the international outsourcing records and information management services company, decided in 2004 to consolidate its finance, purchasing and IT Helpdesk departments on a single site. The company chose to locate this facility in Livingston, citing the area’s “pool of multi-lingual talent and very high quality staff base” as their main reason. “Our staff here enjoy an excellent working environment and short travel to work times. We have had an extraordinary low staff turnover of just 2% in our first year, which is even more impressive considering the generally high turnover rates in the call centre sector.”
Kathryn Mooney, First Point HR Manager, Scottish Courage Contact Centre
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in West Lothian to draw upon a very wide labour pool. West Lothian itself has one of the fastest growing populations in Scotland, and one of the youngest, with an average age of 36. Contact centre and customer service experience is well developed in West Lothian, thanks to the presence of a number of major players in this sector. Add to this affordable business premises and you have a winning formula for businesses looking to grow their contact centre operations from a Scottish base.
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