Chamber Member Featured in the Houston Business Journal: Westpark Communications keeps its lines open!

Kathie Edwards, president and CEO of Westpark Communications LP: ‘I’ve spent the last two years focused on growing the business through networking.’

When Kathie Edwards got a call from her mother in 1992 asking her to temporarily help out at her answering service company, she reluctantly agreed. But after assessing the business, Edwards saw something she couldn’t walk away from: potential.

Now, 20 years later, Edwards has turned that potential into hard revenue and grown Westpark Communications LP from a six-person answering service company into a 60-employee operation that runs two call centers. The company’s services include live-answer, order entry, email response, reservations, payment handling and processing, employee check-in and disaster recovery, among others.

Edwards, who spent one summer during high school answering phones, said that experience made her realize she wasn’t interested in the answering-service business. So she went on to forge a career path that included stints in the mortgage business, the insurance industry and the health care field before getting that urgent call from her mother, who, along with Edwards’ aunt, had founded what was originally known as Westpark Answering Service in 1968.

After a manager left Westpark in 1992 and took a big chunk of the business away, Edwards’ mother, Edna Burgan Wesneski, called and asked Edwards to help get the company back on solid footing. At the time, the company had about 200 clients and was primarily an answering service and message-taking operation.

Edwards’ aunt had retired about eight years earlier, leaving Wesneski the sole owner.

“It was a very small business, but I came in and just saw so much potential,” Edwards said. “I knew if we got more processes into place, we could really grow it. If we could bring in higher-level reps, we could get a higher level of clients who wanted more than just message-taking.”

Edwards and Wesneski spent the next 15 years working together, melding old processes with new technologies and expanding the company’s offerings, size and scope.

Edwards said one of the biggest undertakings was investing in technology that was quickly becoming the norm in clients’ workplaces. Instead of operators taking messages by hand, Edwards purchased training and equipment that indicated which client was receiving an incoming call and let the operators key in messages using a keyboard.

But that investment also required Edwards to bring in new talent.

Of the six operators in place, none knew how to type. So Edwards kept only one of those employees and replaced the other five.
As the company began to grow, Edwards also made some major changes internally. Westpark had never offered its employees any benefits — medical or other — not even vacation time.

“If you didn’t work, you didn’t get paid,” she said.

So she immediately provided medical benefits, vacation time, life insurance and other benefits such as a 401(k) plan.
Edwards credits those changes to raising the average tenure of her operators, which currently stands at about three years. She said that compares to an industrywide average of about one year for call center operators. The average tenure of Westpark’s administrative employees is 12 years.

Since joining Westpark in 1992 and acquiring it from her mother in 2007, technology has continued to emerge at a breakneck pace. And Westpark continues to evolve with it, primarily in response to specific customer requests, Edwards said.

For example, based on a client’s need, Westpark developed a software that handles information on the Q&A section of a client’s Web page. When a customer sends in a question, they are promised an answer within seven minutes. After three minutes, if that client’s reps have not replied to the question, the software rolls the question over to Westpark’s operators, who answer the question, functioning as an extension of the client’s customer service department.

Although that service was created for a specific client, Edwards said it has become popular across the board.
“Because of the cost of software and equipment, most of the expansions of our services have been client-driven,” Edwards said. “We develop something based on client demand, then we are able to roll out the offering to other clients.”

Westpark has grown to 800 clients nationally in industries ranging from direct marketers — which receive responses to radio, television or direct mail spots — to law firms, homebuilders and service companies.

The biggest boost to the expanding client base came in the 1990s, Edwards said, when the retail electricity market became deregulated. Westpark now has six retail electricity providers as clients.

Last October, the firm expanded from its 10,000-square-foot headquarters and call center in the Westchase District with a second call center that spans 8,000 square feet in the Willowbrook area in northwest Houston. The company also has a Tier 4 secured facility in Bryan that holds its equipment and data.

Edwards credits a big part of the company’s growth to her involvement in local networking and woman-owned business organizations, including the Women Business Enterprise Alliance and the Houston West Chamber of Commerce.
It was through the chamber that Edwards met her banker, who assisted her in getting a loan and a working line of credit in 2007 to help Westpark continue its expansion.

“I’ve spent the last two years focused on growing the business through networking,” Edwards said. “It’s a big challenge
to get the company in a position to trust the employees to run the business without me there. But it’s also important for entrepreneurs to get involved in the community and networking to grow their businesses. You have to make a commitment to do that.”