360insights Opens Moncton Office With Plans To Hire Around 200 People
MONCTON – Ontario-based company 360insights has opened a new office in Moncton with around 40 people hired and 20 more people set to join the team in the next few weeks.
In the next 12 to 18 months, the company aims to fill the 14,845-square-foot office on Lutz Street, which is a renovated bowling alley, with around 200 staff members.
360insights, which has around 630 employees, offers rebate processing, sales incentive programs, co-op advertising and channel analytics. It provides brands with software that allows them to optimize their channel incentives spending.
As the company grows – it ran out of space in Whitby – and needs more staff in the customer care and back-office operations, it looked for a new office space.
The roles being filled in Moncton include customer care positions and back-office operations like account and claims processing, claims processing managers, and others.
The company had looked at Halifax, Ottawa and two other cities in Ontario, but Moncton came out on top. It reached out to Opportunities New Brunswick (ONB) in January to begin the process of opening an office.
“It’s important that we pay well, but we want people to be able to live well, as well. It’s hard to do some of those roles even in Whitby and you definitely can’t do it in Toronto,” said founder and CEO Jason Atkins. “And then of course bilingualism is a big component for us as a company. So we looked at a few spots and we came out here.”
In a province with many contact centres, Moncton’s workforce also has the customer care skills 360insights is looking for.
“For our [first two] cohorts, we were able to cut a week off the training because the skill level we were hiring here was better than we’ve hired anywhere else, knowledge-wise, especially in customer care,” Atkins said.
The company, which has offices in the U.S., the U.K. and Haiti, is planning to move many U.S. positions to Moncton.
“We look at this as kind of [a second headquarters] type of thing. As you start to look at critical mass, you want to have more people there. We have a smaller team in the U.S. right now…and we’ve had some challenges recruiting the talent in that area, and so far, things have been very good in hiring here,” said Atkins.
He said one of the issues in the U.S. is the difficulty of getting H1B work visas renewed since changes were made to the system.
“We have a bunch of H1Bs in Chicago and it’s a challenge right now renewing visas,” Atkins said.
ONB provided an incentive of $2.1 million in payroll rebates over four years. The rebates cover between five and 10 percent of a worker’s wage after the company has invested in the hires.
“We audit the numbers at the end of the year and we provide rebates based on that,” said ONB CEO Stephen Lund.
Lund says incentives are necessary in today’s competitive world to attract companies here. But it’s only a small component of what attracted businesses like 360Insights.
“Opening anywhere is not cheap. Opening somewhere further away than where you are isn’t cheap. When we met with ONB, we know we were [going to spend] $1 milion to $1.5 million over the next 12 plus months to get here and most of that upfront,” Atkins said.
The company’s recruitment in Moncton seems to be going well. It hired Gabriela Arsenault three months ago to become its site manager.
Arsenault, who had 10 years of banking contact centre experience, said she wasn’t looking for a new job but became interested after a recruiter approached her.
She says she was attracted to the company’s social work in Haiti, where some of her family members are from, as well as its benefits package. The company offers flexible vacations and tuition reimbursements for staff, among other things.
“That’s really important for me that I work for a company that takes care of people in a very real way and provides a lot of opportunity for development,” she said.
For Atkins, the dream was to have a business that creates an impact socially, but he said doing so is also good for the bottom line and for recruitment.
“That drives your team. Business with a heart is good for business. Most people here believe in the company and believe in what we’re doing.”