EACH Monday morning, Niall Curran gets a report on his desk telling him how long it took telephone callers to get through to his company the previous week. The average is seven and a half seconds, but that’s not good enough.

“Our target is seven,” said Curran, the general manager of Data & Records Management. By focusing relentlessly on customer service, he says the business has quadrupled turnover in the past six years to more than €10m a year.

The Dublin operation, which employs 80 people, was set up in 1989. The introduction of a customer-focused management policy in 2000 marked the start of its strongest growth phase. It stores everything from medical records for hospitals to legal documents for tribunals and transaction files for banks.

“We recognised we weren’t selling document storage so much as trust,” said Curran. “So we went to America and Canada to see best practice on offer there, came back and built a €12m state-of-the-art records centre.”

The facility has its own vaults. Visitors must send copies of their passports in advance just to get in and staff sign confidentiality agreements.

“It’s like Fort Knox around here, but then the kind of documents we store are irreplaceable,” said Curran.

Just as important as investment infrastructure, however, is its investment in people. “Everybody has to undertake a two-month induction period when they join before they start their jobs,” he said. “We are also trained up so that, if the need should arise, everyone can do everyone else’s job.”

Customers are the primary beneficiaries of this effort, which in turn helps the company.

“We have a proactive account management team that is focused on telling clients how best to manage their records and how to do it more efficiently, both in terms of saving them money and in making their records management system more secure,” Curran said.

“Success for us is to give comfort and confidence to the customers, who are keeping their crown jewels with us.”

This attitude is in sharp contrast to the results of a recent survey undertaken for the Institute of Customer Service (ICS), which found that 44% of the companies surveyed fail to respond to customer inquiries.

In relation to an inquiry e-mailed to more than 200 organisations in Ireland and the UK, businesses in the tourism sector scored highest — nearly one quarter of recipients returned a call within 24 hours. The financial services sector came second with a 56% response rate after two days. The travel sector scored lowest — not one of the businesses contacted responded, in any form, at all.

Of the retailers in Ireland, not one of those contacted rang back within 24 hours or sent a personalised e-mail within five days. In fact, more than half of all retailers failed to respond.