Michael Duplessis is Chief Talent Officer at ERC BPO. Michael is candid about how the HubEngage platform helped them personalize employee experience for their employees and boost engagement levels. He also dishes the truth about their experience working with HubEngage to connect their employees across the world.
Q1. Tell us a bit about ERC BPO and your role over there.
Hi, my name is Mike Duplessis and I am the Chief Talent Officer for ERC. ERC is roughly about 7000 employees and we’ve got 10 locations that are split across the US, Dominican Republic, Kenya, South Africa, India, work at home and recently we’ve announced that we are launching in the Philippines and the services that we offer is really you know technology-driven BPO and account recovery services for Fortune 500 companies as well as you know we have a few start-ups under our belt.
Q2. Why invest in employee engagement?
ERC is invested heavily in technology and workforce solutions, different platforms you know one of the things that we pride ourselves on doing is simplifying the running of operations in the CX world. When we go out and we talk about the employee relationship, the employee journey in this job market. We’ve put a lot of investment into figuring out ways to get information to frontline employees to leadership to people cleaning our bathrooms as fast and as quick as possible and so one of the things we saw earlier in my tenure with ERC is that more engaged employees are with the company, the more connected they are with the company, the longer they will stay. For us being able to know how to provide those experiences to customers, it’s all about you know their people, our people, and the people being happy, being solutions first and being connected not only to us but to our partners and so My ERC is a big part of realizing and demonstrating to our employees that we are along with them each step of the way from attraction to recruitment to their first day in training out onto the floor. That’s our vehicle to stay tethered to them.
Q3. How did you drive engagement with employee recognition?
Our people love showcasing, number one, their talent. You know outside of just doing the job so what people would call viral videos of winning specific contests on our site are consumed at a frequent rate by our employees. But, more tangible things are our rewards program that we do quarterly in terms of recognizing our elite players in the company all flows through My ERC. Everything from the nomination process, to the vetting, to the actual announcements and recognition of these individuals, and once we get that recognition then we start seeing more viral videos of people posting what rewards they choose or their congratulations or their thank yous’. And, maybe some of the smaller things that you know what larger organizations look past. It’s simple just anniversaries and birthdays and the recognition of somebody’s birthday or how long they’ve been with the company and putting it out there and through the My ERC app. It has this graphic that shoots off like a celebration of this individual when you access it. It’s those like little touches that remind an employee that they’re more than a number at your see and then you just start to see the dogpiling of people just congratulating them and remembering specific times with that employee.
Q4. How did MY ERC help to connect employees?
The application of My ERC and what you can do with it I mean it’s very malleable to the company‘s culture and what we deem important. I mean, we run everything from our diversity and equality programs through it. Employee engagement op weeks everything from emergency notifications about storms and My ERC is one way we can connect out to employees to make sure that they’re making travel arrangements and staying safe.
Q5. Why did you decide to choose Hubengage for employee engagement?
It was really simple to take something we wanted to incorporate into My ERC and bolt it on, create a tile, so our employee base would have access to it. So that was a pretty compelling value proposition for us. The second point that really sold us on My ERC was the people that we were working with. ERC, we have our own culture, we have our own path that we are headed down and the HubEngage team was there with us throughout that journey customizing it so it fit for us. And you know what, I’ll have to say there was a couple of times we were breaking what My ERC was well built to do and the team themselves, they didn’t look at it as this is a static product here you have it now make the best of it. There was a lot of accommodation saying you know what we don’t have that yet that’s a good idea let’s figure out how to realize that for you. And it’s that type of partnership that goes along with the technology that I really think strengthens you know with the product itself because there’s going to be new and upcoming features the platform can do but also kind of the buy-in from our side that the team itself that was supporting us, wanted us to see what we’ve envisioned in our heads and so you don’t get that as much with some of the companies I’ve worked with in the past so we definitely made that one of the reasons why we chose and stayed with Hubengage.
