A CALOUNDRA business is doing its darndest to turn the perception of off-shore call centres on its head.

Greymouse began seven years ago when married couple Kelvin Davis and Marisa Wiman wanted to start a business that helped Australian SMEs and provided employment opportunities to people in Fiji.

“To be honest, we did not have a clue how to deliver the service, so we started listening to the small to medium business about the challenges they faced,” Ms Wiman said.

“These included a strong dislike of call centres generally, especially overseas call centres, a need for 24-hour service delivery, online social media and web retail sales all delivered reliably regardless of the platform.

“We started supplying virtual assistants and services to business from Mackay to Melbourne, constantly improving voice quality, SMS and communication until the end customer couldn’t tell where the support actually came from.

“Now we offer four cloud services, call centres, IT cloud services for resellers, Network Operations Centres for IT companies and a teleconference service.”

Greymouse has 34 staff in a Suva office, with a twice yearly recruitment drive framed around a six-month training and induction course.

“With higher speed internet, the Coast gives us the connection needed for managing the remote office and we chose to live in Caloundra for lifestyle reasons.

“We chose Fiji for a specific purpose. The culture is to be of service, the Southern Cross internet cable is terminated in Suva, it is in the Australian time zone and Kelvin and I previously worked under contract for a business in Fiji, so we learnt the culture.”

Some drawbacks to the decision were cultural and technological, when cables go down or Optus is offline. But even the January floods did not disrupt service.

“We often get asked about the ‘political instability’ in Fiji. To tell you the truth, it has never affected Greymouse or us personally. The team delivers the service, the office has got five internet providers, we have a generator, we have a disaster plan and we have a passion to do what we say we do. The political issues are kept outside our office and as a united team, we have been nicely growing.”

Customers include Solomon Islands Electricity Authority, Sonar Monitoring, Yarra Trams, Munro Leys law (Fiji), Burg Networks, Ordyss and others in PNG as well as the Sunshine Pet Resort, Balloonaversal, Markinson software and about 1100 customers who use the teleconference services from 20 countries around the world.

Ms Wiman said the company’s motto was “service delivered at the speed of Google” and it aimed to be the McDonald’s of customer service, providing the same service every time.