Answering the call for customized service.

• Author: Ross, Ian
• Position: Cochrane Public Utilities Commission - Brief Article

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...