The world's local bank
Global resourcing
Global resourcing is an important component of our business strategy, playing a key role in delivering shareholder value and helping HSBC remain competitive in the global financial services market.
Almost 25,000 employees in our 10 GSCs in five countries (China, India, Malaysia, the Philippines and Sri Lanka) support customers in Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific with account administration, credit card payments, mortgages and telephone enquiries. Our GSCs enable us to harness a diverse range of skills, knowledge and languages and to avoid being overly dependent on any one region or economy.
Social impacts
By creating jobs in emerging markets, we believe HSBC is making a positive contribution to global social and economic development. The people who work in our GSCs are direct employees of HSBC, not outsourced agencies. They are trained to the same high standards as their colleagues around the world and work in an environment that meets our international standards. They are also subject to the same stringent rules and regulations that govern data security and privacy elsewhere in the HSBC Group.
Training is thorough, and empathy with customers is valued. We do not ask our GSC colleagues to change their names or accents, or to hide where they are located.
Managing global resourcing risks
Managing change. In countries from which work is being transferred, our aim is to manage change while treating people fairly and sensitively. We work with trade unions, and use natural attrition and redeployment to avoid redundancies wherever possible. In the UK, for example, we reached an agreement in 2004 with the financial services union, Unifi, on consultation periods and redeployment. We made £4 million (US$7.3 million) available for assistance such as counselling and retraining.
Customer dissatisfaction. Comparisons of ‘before’ and ‘after’ are not easy to make, but our tracking suggests that global resourcing has generally allowed us to maintain or improve our overall high standards of operational efficiency and customer service. However, a main source of complaints — about one in 1,000 calls — relates to difficulties in communicating with our call centre agents. To address this, we are investing more in advanced language training for certain roles and have appointed both a Head of Customer Experience and a dedicated Head of Call Centres to co-ordinate our improvement efforts.
Long-term competitiveness. While salaries in GSCs are rising in line with a competitive local labour market, we expect the large supply of skilled people, and the cost benefits compared with developed countries, to continue for the foreseeable future.
Group Service Centres
| 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | |
| Number of centres | 10 | 11 | 9 | 5 |
| Number of employees | 25,000 | 20,000 | 12,500 | 7,000 |
2007 Sustainability Report
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