Answering the call for customized service.

Cochrane PUC establishes premier call centre

The Cochrane Public Utilities has kept pace with the demands of the community and marketplace by providing essential water, sewer, electric and local telephone services to this community of 4,300 since 1921.

Through the continuing evolution of its telephone department it offers digital, cellular, Internet service, and most recently, full call-centre capabilities at its new Northern Ontario OnCall facility.

Since its January 2000 start-up, the centre has prided itself on excellent staff, advanced technology and the willingness to provide fully-customized packages for contracts and campaigns.

Stephanie Deschenes, the call centre's director, says attracting a major telemarketing developer had been on Cochrane's wish list for years, but the community's small population base was a drawback to attracting legions of recruits. The PUG's goal has always been to break even at the lowest possible rates for rate payers, but it also wanted to generate employment in the community.

It has achieved that goal.

Now operating out of a 585-square-metre former Ministry of Transportation building and employing more than 100 full- and part-time staff, Deschenes says its biggest selling points remain flexibility to fit client needs and to tailor itself to any contract or campaign.

"We have 46 seats (operating in two weekday shifts), but physically we have space for 96," Deschenes says. The centre has already undergone one expansion that has doubled the number of seats within the last three months. Although the centre deals with Fortune 500 companies, Deschenes says she welcomes inquiries from closer to home.

"We also want to be available to Northern Ontario companies who might need call centre services," she says.

Already, the centre has extensive outbound experience ranging from sales to survey work. Sales calls have included offering health and auto benefits packages for major credit card companies, memberships and magazines.

Some of its survey work includes polling data for political campaigns and longer-term programs detailing consumer spending habits.

Inbound work with a telecommunication firm deals with billing information, recommending packages, providing customer service and processing orders.

"We're on a Wide Area Network with one of our clients," she says, "making customer changes right within their database."

The human resources aspect includes an extensive hiring and screening process in recruiting prospective agents for literacy and mathematical skills and voice quality.

Joelle Harris, human resources manager, draws recruits from Cochrane and the wider geographical area of Smooth Rock Falls, Iroquois Falls, Matheson and even Timmins. New recruits undergo three days of basic training to hone their listening skills, acquaint themselves with the systems and learn "phone-friendly" sales techniques before undertaking more client-specific training.

"Depending on the contracts we're working on, we're looking for people who can promote and convey a sense of enthusiasm to the client," Harris says. "We're always looking for bilingual employees as well because we're looking at entertaining clients from various contracts that require those services.

"Because we're so far up north, we want to tap into as many contracts with as many companies as possible. We're looking for anything that substantiates remaining open and employing as many people as we can."

Besides offering a flexible work schedule for part-timers and mature students and an attractive bonus program, Harris says ongoing skills development and upgrades remain a priority.

When it comes to current technology, Northern Ontario OnCall takes a back seat to no one. The facility operates with a Portal Connect Call Management System (CMS), which enables its customer service agents to handle inbound and outbound calls with greater speed and efficiency.

Dan Morrish, IT manager, says the dialer for outbound calls is a specialized software package whereby the system does the dialing and a live contact is transferred to an agent.

The algorithm of the CMS efficiently manages the customer service representative's outbound talk time by delivering those contacts to their workstations instead of dealing with busy signals, unanswered or abandoned calls.

Outgoing calls for individual numbers can also be rescheduled for another time, or a specific pre-recorded message can be played prior to rescheduling the call.

Depending on the settings selected, the CMS allows for the best form of answering machine screening for the centre's needs.

For inbound calls, Automatic Number Identification, Dialed Number Identification Service and collected digits are used to select scripts as well as provide names and account information. Agents are presented with matching records tapped into a client company's database to accept a match, start another database search or enter new records.

The technology allows agents to provide the appropriate level of service, provide opportunities for cross-selling, personalize the call or resolve customer service needs.

The CMS also provides ScriptVision, a software program used to create inbound and outbound scripts that can be quickly implemented and edited as required. Reporting data provides an instantaneous overview of shift activity during any time period required to monitor an individual agent's productivity and overall system management.

Real-time statistics can be quickly compiled for research and data mining by providing details on agent productivity, campaign performance and overall dialing results to make quick condition adjustments. Clients can even listen to conversations Northern Ontario OnCall agents are handling through remote monitoring capabilities.

Providing a secure facility receives top consideration. Surveillance cameras with 24-hour recording capacity scan the building while motion detectors are set up after hours. All sensitive materials such as client information are treated with extreme care and are restricted to authorized management and IT department personnel. Doors have key-code locks and are kept secure at all times.