Webhelp is a leading services provider in customer experience, and manages customer service on behalf of more than 1,350 of the world’s leading companies. It employs more than 120,000 people across more than 60 countries, and in the last year alone it has won more than 50 industry awards. Webhelp strives to be the best at one thing and one thing only, creating amazing customer experiences. Benjamin Faes, CEO of the UK region, Webhelp, tells Intelligent CXO more about the company and its vision for the future.
Tell us a bit more about Webhelp as a business and how it started.
Webhelp manages customer service on behalf of more than 1,350 of the world’s leading companies. In fact – we work with the top five brands in the world, according to the Interbrand Brand Index.
Customer experience has become increasingly important for organisations around the world and is now being recognised by many as a competitive differentiator. As such, it has become a multi-billion-dollar industry, attracting the attention of industry analysts such as Gartner, Everest and Frost & Sullivan – which rank Webhelp as a leading service provider in this space.
Since our founding in 2000, we’ve grown to have sales of more than EU2.5 billion. Today, we employ more than 120,000 employees across more than 60 countries, which is an incredible testament to the hard, value-creating work that we’ve done for clients – and the strength of our strategic approach to business. We are proud to have been recognised with more than 50 industry award wins globally this past year.
Webhelp strives to be the best at one thing and one thing only, creating amazing customer experiences. Our CEO has just had a book published on exactly that. In a world where every customer is potentially a brand ambassador (or detractor) on social media, we want to help our clients manage their own reputation and create memorable experiences for their own customers.
How has the business grown since it started and how did you ensure growth?
We’ve grown fast in two clear ways, both organically through client wins and through acquisitions such as our recent expansion into Brazil with Grupo Services. One thing I find special about Webhelp’s acquisition strategy is that we only acquire founder-led businesses with strong entrepreneurial spirit that fits the business mentality really well.
What’s the business’ approach to management?
It’s the founders’ entrepreneurial spirit of taking initiative, taking risks, taking ownership of, and being accountable for, the work we do and finding solutions for our clients. It’s a relatively simple mantra, but it’s proven consistently robust over the years.
What is Webhelp’s vision and goal?
We really strive to be the best global CX business partner, to both large and small brands. It’s relatively simple to start a brand but challenging to make a success of one. The best brands know to outsource complex issues around customer experience to specialist partners, and there aren’t many businesses like ours that can partner with them across all markets and languages and accompany them in their growth and transformation. Coming back to the founder mentality, we have a programme called The Nest, focused on helping start-ups scale and improve their CX operations, which to many other outsourcing businesses would seem an insignificant mission. It’s our passion to help smaller businesses scale.
What kind of clients and market do you serve?
We work across most sectors, including but not limited to, automotive, retail, financial services, travel, hi-tech, fashion, telecoms and healthcare. Now in over 60 countries, we are serving over 1,350 brands every day. Two decades in, we maintain our agility, disruptive mindset and the ambition of being the biggest start-up in the world.
We’re at a size and scale where we receive a lot of requests from prospective clients. We’re at the point now where we only work with clients with whom we share a strong cultural fit. Webhelp is a strategic partner, not just a supplier, so we want to work with those who can also buy-in to our mission and aims – a true synergy, creating great outcomes.
What has your career looked like so far?
I started off in marketing at L’Oréal before moving to AOL where I helped build, from scratch, the ad sales and content divisions. I became CEO of AOL France to transform the business from an Internet provider to a major media player and a leader in digital advertising and sales.
I was approached by Google to launch its young YouTube business across Europe, helping to transform how future generations would consume media. I moved around within Google, championing leading-edge innovation, overseeing the DoubleClick acquisition and integration, sponsoring the Digital News initiative, and then leading the development of the Google Cloud division across most of Europe.
When I turned 50, I looked back on my achievements, and thought about what my next big challenge should be. That’s when Webhelp and CEO, Olivier Duha, got in touch. I was impressed with its mission and culture and the entrepreneurial spirit at the heart of the business. I’ve been able to bring the best of what I’ve learnt in my career to a fresh area of innovation – the customer and their experience of a brand or business.
How do you equip your staff with skills and knowledge?
The level of skill and knowledge at Webhelp is already amazingly high – so the opportunity is there to focus strategically on emerging tech and what more we can do for clients. We attract and recruit talent from top schools and universities, but it’s still important to focus on on-going skill development. Beyond that, we also seek people with a natural curiosity and who want to grow and learn. We offer multiple programmes, senior exec level training and regular ‘know-how’ sessions across the business to ensure that new technology and strategic initiatives are being understood at each level of Webhelp.
How do you work with other executives within the C-suite to make sure your voice is heard?
The challenge at C-suite level can often be getting the right balance between speaking too much or too little. My senior roles have enabled me to understand intrinsically that it’s often about empowering others to excel. No one at Webhelp has an overwhelming desire to grow their own siloed empire. We have open and natural conversations at the highest level in our Global Management Committee. One driver for our success is that the vast majority of Webhelp’s leadership have shares in the company – not given to them, they’ve actively invested in our success.
That said, constant communication between divisions is pivotal to ensuring we create leading CX solutions for clients, where the CMO knows who is likely to be needing our help and how to frame our skills to the marketplace, and the CTO can work to develop the complex systems needed to deliver.
How do you ensure different teams in your organisation work together?
On top of specific client work, each year we identify what we call WIGs, wildly important goals. These are collaboratively developed specific objectives on top of our normal KPIs. They lead to the development of new cross-functional teams to create even more value for the company. For example, we currently have a WIG exploring how to attract more top-quality talent and help employees build long-lasting careers within Webhelp. It entails a cross-pollination of operations, HR and even finance, all working together. We place great importance on these WIGs to keep us above-and-beyond usual operational needs.
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