forum system. The Company also states its commitment to “having a positive impact in the
locations in which it operates” through such community activities as sponsoring family
concerts, encouraging its employees to volunteer in local schools and supporting its long-
term charity partner, Ambitious About Autism. Talktalk’s CSR commitment to communities
and its employees has been rewarded through its inclusion in the FTSE4Good Index, an index
of companies that meet global corporate responsibility standards. The index is designed to
help socially responsible investors make their investment decisions.
TalkTalk in Ireland
TalkTalk provides phone and broadband services in the UK, but it has operated a Customer
Contact Centre for its UK customers in Waterford since 1998 (formerly as AOL Broadband).
It has grown from a small operation of 30 employees in 1998 to 575 in mid-2011. During that
time it has won numerous awards and in 2007 was rated as one of the Top 50 companies to
work for in Ireland by the Great Places to Work Institute. In late 2009, at the announcement
of a further 60 jobs at the Waterford call centre, the director of Contact Centres for Talk Talk
had the following to say about the staff at Waterford: “The driving force behind TalkTalk’s
growth over the past 10 years has been our people, whose skills, professionalism and
dedication are essential to our continuing success. We have a fantastic team here in
Waterford, made up of highly motivated individuals who put our customers at the centre of
everything we do. We are delighted to expand our workforce here again and continue our
ongoing commitment to the local community in the southeast”. While Waterford has
benefitted from the presence of TalkTalk, the company has also benefitted over the past 10
years from IDA Ireland grants (the Industrial Development Agency). Recent IDA data shows
that in 2008 and 2009, TalkTalk received €2.5 million of taxpayer money for training and
developing their employees.
However, TalkTalk ended its commitment to Waterford with the announcement on
September 7
th
2011 that it was closing its call centre in Waterford 30 days later with the loss
of all 575 jobs. The news was broken to staff in Waterford at a meeting, though employees
who were not rostered to work that day heard the news via the radio and social networking
sites. The announcement came as a shock to the staff as they had received an e-mail from
management only the previous day telling them that the Waterford call centre had achieved a
record performance during the month of August. It also came as a shock to those Irish
employees who had been sent to the UK to train staff there in recent months, as it now
dawned on them that they had been training other people to take their own jobs: “We were
told that it was in case we got busy, that they would be a backup. But all along we were
training them to take our jobs”, said one employee. Another noted that he was under the
impression he was climbing the corporate ladder when asked to help the company expand by
training staff in the UK. He said he now felt “corporately violated”. He added: “It’s all about
the profit margin and pleasing the shareholders”.
The company announced that some of the jobs will move to the UK while much of the work
will be taken up by outsourced call centres in South Africa and India. It justified the decision
on the basis that call volumes had fallen by 40 percent year on year as more customers had
opted to deal with support issues online. It also stated that: “As our largest in-house site, the
proposed closure of Waterford allows us to reduce complexity, simplify our skill sets and
bring benefits to customers as quickly as possible. Waterford is our only site that operates
with the euro, and the proposed change will therefore also limit our exposure to exchange rate
fluctuations”.