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Capita has won a £160m ten-year BPS deal with high street retailer Carphone Warehouse (CPW), to take over its existing contact centres and business process operations in Acton and Warrington. The deal covers a range of front office services including sales, customer services, first line technical support, complaint handling, collections and revenue management for CPW, and its Talkmobile and the Geek Squad divisions. A Capita spokesperson told us that around 600 CW staff will be transferring to Capita under TUPE, and it will continue to use CPW's offices in Acton until August 2014 and Warrington until May 2014.
As far as we can tell CPW will now have outsourced all of its customer contact functions. Its TalkTalk subsidiary already has relationships with Wipro BPO and Merchants, the contact centre/BPO division of Dimension Data for contact centre services delivered respectively out of India and South Africa.
CPW is a significant first generation outsource for Capita, and particularly important since it will be all new revenue (c£16m per annum), and contribute to Capita’s organic growth story. It is also an endorsement of recent acquisitions of Ventura and Vertex Private Sector for customer management (see here and work back). Capita is now the largest player in the UK customer management space, but there is plenty of competition from Serco (see Serco wins retail BPO mega-deal), offshore IT/BP players and contact centre pure plays like Sitel and Teleperformance.
Capita’s differentiator is its depth and breadth of business process capability beneath the customer contact layer. Consumer-focused organisations like retailers will increasingly need help transforming their underlying business processes if they hope to capitalise on opportunities presented by multichannel via mobile, social media and self-service.
Capita talks about its ‘data-driven analytics and customer-centered service design’. Although scarce on detail, these are definitely important capabilities in this new multichannel environment. But for us Capita still scores highest in ‘rolling its sleeves’ up business process re-engineering.
For instance, the plan at CPW is to establish centres of excellence in Preston, and in some of Capita’s existing locations where CPW’s work may transfer. This is all about consolidating resources, and using assets in the best way to drive economies for both the client and Capita. True Capita ‘knitting’.
