Cultivating culture
Beryl strives to put employees first
Days after Halloween, elaborate decorations still reigned over the call center. Trees made of twisted paper stretched their limbs over the employees, and an oversized “Beryl full of monkeys” overflowing with primates.
Because the employees spend most of their work days seated at their desks fielding phone calls from people in various health care situations, making the work environment inviting is vital. The primary focus of Beryl Cos., a company based in Bedford, is to better the life of its employees, and second to that is providing the best product to its clients, according to Paul Spiegelman, the companyÂ’s founder and CEO.
Beryl, the nationÂ’s largest customer-interaction service provider specifically for the health care industry, started with three brothers, Mark, Paul and Barry, and has grown to about 350 employees and is expected to have revenue of about $30 million for 2008, Spiegelman said. HeÂ’s originally from California, and went from being an attorney to creating a company with a particular emphasis on corporate culture.
Finding the right employees to work with callers who are sometimes in high-stress situations is the start of BerylÂ’s success, Spiegelman said. If 125 resumes come in for a position, only four people are hired after multiple rounds of screenings and interviews, and each employee gets five weeks of classroom and on-the-job training before theyÂ’re let loose in the call center. Skills can be honed in training, but an employee canÂ’t be taught to fit in to the companyÂ’s culture, Spiegelman said.
“You either come with that compassion and empathy or you don’t – you can’t train that,” he said.
Once employees are a part of Beryl, cultivating loyalty in them creates a “circle of growth,” he said. Small gestures
– like letting employees decorate for holidays, or providing wellness tools like a points-incentive program and a
basketball court, or giving every employee a $50 gas card this summer, or having an executive who was hired to fill the role of “queen of fun and laughter” – let employees know that the company wants them to be in the best position they can be, he said. Call centers have notoriously high turnover rates, ranging from 80 to 100 percent turnover each year, but Beryl’s is less than 20 percent, he said.
Generating loyalty in employees makes them create loyalty from the clients; clients have their profits driven up as Beryl helps drive new business; clients help drive the profits at Beryl; Beryl invests its profits back into the employees because it is a privately held company and doesnÂ’t have to turn profits back to shareholders, Spiegelman said.
In 1985, Spiegelman and his two brothers, Mark and Barry, started the company as an alarm system for emergency health care service. The first client was their grandfather, who had congestive heart failure, and the system had a speaker system so that he – or another person with the system – could talk to someone once they summoned assistance. They then approached hospitals to see if they’d offer the system to their patients, and Spiegelman and his brothers found themselves serving as a communication point.
“We were a 24-hour business from the day we started in April 1985,” Spiegelman said.
Their business then evolved into handling calls for hospitals when one institution offered to install a phone line and give them a listing of physicians so they could answer questions about physician referrals. In the mid-Â’90s they sold their original emergency service company and secured a contract with a Columbia/HCA, a nationwide hospital system now called HCA Inc., to handle all of the customer service-type calls.
“Health care is finally realizing, or hospitals, that they’re in the customer service business,” Spiegelman said.
Spiegelman owns 85 percent of the company, and his oldest brother, Mark, isnÂ’t directly involved in the company anymore but owns the other 15 percent. Their other brother, Barry, died of a recurrence of brain cancer a few years ago.
The company that started in a tiny room in California now serves nearly 500 hospitals across the country and in more than 35 states and handles phone calls ranging from answering questions on 800 numbers (like 1-800-4BAYLOR for the Baylor Health Care System) to doing class and event registrations. They also field service calls, outpatient appointment scheduling, follow-up calls, and they partner with another company to offer advice from nurses to patients over the phone, such as whether a parent should take their child to the emergency room or wait for a doctorÂ’s visit.
While New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania have the highest concentration of hospitals who use Baylor, the company does have clients closer to their home base. The Baylor system, based in Dallas, has used Beryl since April 2006, and prior to that a group of operators in an internal call center dealt with any phone calls, said Patty Reupke, director of consumer relationship marketing with Baylor. The problem, she said, was that phones were only answered during traditional working hours and health care questions and situations crop up at any point.
“We can’t control when someone gets sick or when someone needs a doctor, but when someone needs a doctor, they need a doctor,” Reupke said.
Baylor needed a partner for inbound inquiries at all times, she said, and they turned to Beryl because of the companyÂ’s experience handling health care-specific questions and employees who work with extensive technology to emphasize efficiency and quality. Beryl fields about 105,000 calls a year for Baylor, Reupke said, and there are virtually never any complaints because those who answer the phones are well suited to their jobs.
“It’s not just anybody who can fog a mirror,” she said.
Because Beryl is the largest health care-centered customer service company, itÂ’s in a position to share what its employees have learned since 1985. The Beryl Institute brings together the companyÂ’s millions of data points that revolve around customer experiences and shares its evidence-based studies through an annual conference and a regular publication.
These days, Spiegelman is spending a good deal of time on the road, serving as a guest lecturer talking about corporate culture, something he addressed in his book Why is Everyone Smiling? The Secret Behind Passion, Productivity and Profit. He admits he didnÂ’t go to business school, but the familial feeling he fostered with his brothers is still in the company.
“The joy for me now is sharing . . . who we are, not what we do or what we sell,” he said.
