Hill-Wilson lifts lid on new venture

Good call: Brainfood aims to improve call centre workers' listening skills and sales techniques

Former Datapoint strategy director Martin Hill-Wilson has claimed his new venture, Brainfood Training, represents a return to his roots.

The e-learning specialist recently launched its flagship course, titled Listening Skills for Customer Service.

Hill-Wilson said: ""This is primarily for people in customer-facing positions, with a particular nod to those people working in call centres. There are not many jobs where you have to talk solidly for eight hours a day, every call is monitored and you are expected to be brilliant at it straight away."

He indicated that the course has already attracted interest from banks and telcos. He added that offshore organisations, including public sector bodies, were also keen to get involved.

"(Large enterprise) is the market I am most familiar with," he said. "The thing I will be fascinated by is whether I can sell to small businesses, because it is as much designed for them (as anyone)."

Hill-Wilson claimed SMEs would be tempted by a competitive price of £399 for the initial licence, and £20 a head thereafter. He explained that continual attention to employees' skill levels was particularly prudent in an industry where staff churn was as high as 30 per cent per year.

Improving workers listening skills and their ability to take advantage of sales opportunities are two key areas of focus, claimed Hill-Wilson.

"There is a tremendous focus on trying to make call centres pay for themselves by doing a lot of cross-selling and upselling," he said. "To make these programmes work, you need to be very good at interacting with customers."

Hill-Wilson has been a prominent figure in the comms channel for a decade. He worked for Dimension Data and, most recently, Datapoint, where he served as strategy director for five years. He explained that his early roles in the call centre industry had been focused on customer service.

"I never really went that far away," he said. "The technology was a later skill, but I decided to go full circle."