APTA is the leading force in advancing public transportation.

As a member of the American Public transportation Association (APTA), we are part of an international organization that has been representing the transit industry for over 100 years, since 1882.

APTA members serve the public interest by providing safe, efficient and economical transit services, and by improving those services to meet national energy, environmental, and financial concerns. Over ninety percent of passengers using transit in the U.S. and Canada are carried by APTA members.

APTA members are public organizations that are engaged in the areas of bus, paratransit, light rail, commuter rail, subways, waterborne passenger services, and high-speed rail. Members also include large and small companies who plan, design, construct, finance, supply, and operate bus and rail services worldwide. Government agencies, metropolitan planning organizations, state departments of transportation, academic institutions, and trade publications are also part of our membership.

APTA has six different categories of membership, and offers a “Basic option” to certain of those. See the “Membership” link for full description.

APTA members are encouraged to participate in, contribute to, and benefit from a myriad of programs, activities, and services.

Quoted from the APTA website.

GCS broke records with political work in the last month before the election.

Our associates called over 50,000 hours during the month of October.  Total, we performed over 63,000 hours of political work between October 1st and Election Day.

GCS even partnered with other centers to provide thousands of additional hours to help our clients.

The political programs this season ran the gamut from small, local campaigns all the way to calling for the Presidential race.

It was definitely a team effort at GCS to see this political season through to the end. Nearly everyone at GCS played a part in the political season success. Our scripting team members, client service directors, accounting & payroll and dialer managers all did their part, making this season great!

Great job to everyone who helped make this political season a success!

After the Votes Have Been Counted

What happens now?

Campaigns are over. Elections have been completed. To say this season was busy would be an understatement.

We performed so well for our clients that we earned some post-election survey work.

GCS has spent many months participating in the 2012 election season and since it has come to a close, we must look forward to other projects and opportunities.

This is the time of year where most companies start to either think about or finalize their 2013 budgets and we are ready to take advantage!

As GCS puts a close on the political chapter for 2012, we now have the opportunity to seek out proposals and partnerships with new and existing clients.

The marketing team is now working extremely hard to follow up with prospective clients to scope out new programs for GCS in 2013, while also working diligently completing requests for proposals and getting new start-ups in place for the new year.

Our focus all along has been to diversify our client base and service several different industries, instead of a few select ones. This will continue to be our focus as we seek out new opportunities. We are looking at new ways to retain partnerships and are actively seeking out paths to break into new industries.

The team is also focusing on various other projects such as:

• Checking out new tools and channels to make GCS even more visible in the marketplace
• Making a list and checking it twice for our client holiday gifts
• Continuing to monitor and analyze our web traffic and incorporate new features to bring more visitors to our sites
• Streamline our information gathering to complete requests from prospective clients
• Building our organization membership list and beginning to identify key tradeshows and seminars for GCS representatives to attend in 2013
• Continuing to support our sites and departments with recruiting, internal communication and branding

Even though the busy political work has been completed, we still have lots of work ahead of us and we are excited to see it all come together.

Although it was extremely rewarding to help out the red, white and blue, we’re excited to see what else the maroon, orange and gold can accomplish!

What a week! The superstorm, Sandy, has left damage and destruction that will take a long time for recovery. The amount of repair is staggering and in some cases, recovery will be more like replacement. Some homes and commercial buildings will not be rebuilt.

With so much advanced notice, media and government announcements made preparation much easier. At GCS, we have a Disaster Preparedness process that encompasses our Disaster Recovery plan. For example, the week before Sandy hit the east coast our team made the following moves:

• Checked and double checked our generator power in the centers.
• Communicated with our Co-location owners to confirm their uptime plans.
• Set all communication channels to “on” 24 hours a day.
• Changed work schedules to accelerate programs needing end-of-month completion.
• Moved several Customer Service programs to our west coast operation.
• Sent daily updates to all associates by e-mail and kept our hotline message current to the hour.

The preparation paid off. Our Beckley area center received over twelve inches of snow and stayed up and open to service clients.

Not only were we able to complete all our work during the storm, but we also helped a Philadelphia based contact center by briefly re-directing their customer care calls to our Yuma center. Sandy was a storm the likes of which only happen every 250 years. We hope the next one comes in the year 2262. Maybe GCS will still be here and we’ll be bragging about our ability to be prepared for any natural disaster.

Many companies have disaster recovery plans in place. They know what to do when bad weather, natural disasters or other unforeseen events occur. At GCS, we take it a step further. We believe in disaster preparedness.

This week, our West Virginia sites felt the wrath of Sandy, not by hurricane winds and flooding but by copious amounts of snow. West Virginia is used to snowy weather but this amount, in a short period of time, in late October was unheard of.

Because of the country roads and mountainous terrain, it was difficult to estimate how much the storm would impact our teams in West Virginia.

But GCS was already taking control before the storm even hit. Teams gathered last weekend to determine what needed to happen before the storm hit and what the response would be if the storm had a major impact.

We also increased our communication internally to our associates to keep everyone up-to-date on what was happening at the centers. Fortunately for our Huntington location, the area only saw about an inch of snow (higher elevations received 4 to 5 inches) and although it did impede some associates’ work commutes, the site opened and ran as normal.

Our Mount Hope facility took GCS’ brunt of the storm. Many residents saw up to a foot of snow and with heavy wind gusts, it proved to be difficult to get around.

Billie Jean Calvert, shift manager, tells us about the impact on her site.

“On Monday October 29th, the news crew was calling for heavy snow fall in the mountains. Associates of GCS in Mount Hope weremaking preparations. Since the power outage this area had during the summer is still fresh on our minds, we tend to panic just thinking about being without power at work or at home. Some associates came in early or worked late Monday to prepare just in case they were unable to work on Tuesday, which they were not.”

The Mt. Hope center has a generator, fortunately this time the town didn’t lose power for very long. However, many of our folks in surrounding counties, including Billie Jean, are still without power in their homes.  And even a few days later, the team is still doing what they can.

“Here at GCS Mt. Hope, we are offering snacks throughout the day and working with each associate on their scheduling.
We are an extended family and will support each other just as we do our own families.”

This storm wasn’t as bad as some have been in the past but our IT teams and our site in Yuma were ready to handle any additional work needed to be accomplished. GCS has a well-defined disaster preparedness plan in place to tackle any natural disaster that comes our way.

From before it happens to the aftermath, we are always ready.

Great customer service is the culmination of two things, first, having compliant business practices and second, delivering excellent customer interactions. Swirling throughout much of our industry today is a focus on the practice and use of compliance and how it serves an important purpose in delivering consumer friendly interactions.

GCS goes to great lengths to ensure our practices are compliant and up to the standards set forth by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), FCC, FTC, other laws and regulations, and client requirements. The sole mission of the CFPB is to make markets work for American consumers. That is what GCS and our clients want, too.

Frank Camp, senior vice president explains. “Recent events with a new oversight bureau [CFPB] within the financial services industry has given us an opportunity to re-examine our business processes and their daily implementation to ensure we meet and/or exceed the expectations of the our clients and their customers. The good news is our business processes have withstood the ‘test of time’ and have formed a solid base of compliance giving our clients comfort that they can count on GCS.

Ultimately the processes, rules, regulations, laws, etc., have been enacted to respect the wishes of consumers and to provide clarity of offers and transactions. Those are sensible considerations we have always built into our process and training. ”

Customer service begins even before an interaction between our associates and customers. Training is done to make sure every exchange is consistent with the overall message of our clients. All outgoing calls are screened for DNC requests and permission to call.

Our Quality Assurance department is dedicated to compliance. They assist with both agent improvement and compliance. Teams are trained to:

• Audit for proof of enrollment.
• Ensure adherence to the client’s message and call requirements.
• Listen for compliance to all applicable laws, regulations and CFPB requirements.
• Make sure client and consumer information is protected with heavy security. All technology, data, hardware, software, and processes are designed to meet the client’s required level of security and control.

In today’s new environment, some competitors and products are suffering due to holes in their compliant practices. It goes to show there are no shortcuts when it comes to compliance and great customer service.

Frank Camp describes seven important compliance considerations for anyone using an outsource provider to perform customer engagement services:

• Regulatory Education. Agent education is extremely important. Any representative who will have live customer contact should be well-versed in Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), Do Not Call rules, and proper customer treatment. Any solid education program with a partner should always contain regulatory training you can examine at any time.
• Privacy Concerns. Customer privacy is another important aspect of any contact center initiative. A contact center should be able to demonstrate how they handle and protect the privacy of customer information and how they administer privacy and security training for associates.
• Call Recordings. The partner should also demonstrate how they manage call recordings. The requirements for recording may vary based on your needs, but having effective tools for recording calls (particularly sales confirmations) and accessibility to those recordings is key.

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Frank continues, “You can count on GCS to be a solid business partner, fully aware of the compliance aspects for your business and industry as they relate to the contact center industry. We are prepared to share our track record to demonstrate how we can meet and exceed your expectations!”

We want to maintain solid, long-term partnerships with everyone. Being 100% compliant ensures we can continue to provide excellent customer service, both inbound and outbound, on behalf of our clients. All channels at all times.

The GCS sales team is gearing up for a busy fall on the tradeshow and seminar circuit. You can find GCS at the following events this season:

Electronic Retailing Association D2C Convention
Las Vegas, NV
September 11-13
www.retailing.org

CCNG Networking Event
Arlington, TX
September 24-26
www.ccng.com

ABIA Annual Conference
Phoenix, AZ
September 24-26
www.aba.com/abia

Stop by and see us if you’re there!

The live agent contact is more personal and engaging than robo calls.

Every American can probably tell it’s getting closer and closer to election time. At GCS, we’ve seen the political spectrum gain more and more momentum in 2012 and our political programs are starting to really generate some energy as November looms.

“We’ve seen a wide variety of programs; everything from traditional polling programs to advocacy programs. One specific interest group, the Texas Longhorn Network, engaged us to persuade folks to voice their opinions on Texas football including coverage on their local cable providers.

We’ve completed work for both political parties and saw a great deal of success in the races we’ve been involved in so far, especially in the early primary elections. The live agent contact is more personal and engaging than robo calls. With so many races so close, that extra influence can make the difference at the poll.”

At GCS, we work hard to provide our clients with the best service possible on these programs and it’s definitely a team effort.

“Internally, we’ve enjoyed a great level of effort from all the folks involved, including applications development and the contact center staff and associates. A special thanks and recognition go out to Kelly Hedgecock and Karen Morriss. Kelly has been available all hours of the day and night to help plan and execute the programs flawlessly. Karen is an irreplaceable person and has done an awesome job scripting and getting all the programs ready, particularly on short notice and at the end of already long days. We couldn’t do all this work without either of these two fine people.”

We understand the importance of quick turn-around for these programs to the election process and are happy we can provide this service to our valued clients.

Our definition of compliance is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting the SAME result. It’s a play on the insanity definition popularized by fitness promoters and certainly helps send the message of consistency in following client requirements.

Recently, we had a surprise audit from a client requesting a random sample of over 2,000 sales recordings from the more than 50,000 we archive for them. The audit score for GCS was a perfect 100%. To me, it was the equivalent to bowling 300.

Another way we keep score in our compliance success is inour data management process. Said simply, we can’t make a mistake. Our data management needs to be perfect. For example, one client sent us 250 million records to compare with a much smaller marketing file. We must compare the two files and make sure everything matches. Remember six sigma? We call this process nine sigma.

Adhering to client requirements is simply a business qualifier in our industry.

It’s non-negotiable and high profile. Most of our clients are public companies and must respond to neverending consumer, industry and government scrutiny. Today’s approach to marketing has more legal and conformance language than ever before. The poor customer has to commit extra time to listening to, or reading exclusions and disclosures, before receiving the product.

If you are going to be successful in this environment, you have to be compliance driven. Phillip Crosby’s Four Absolutes of Quality might be decades old, but they certainly apply today. The first three – Conformance, Prevention, and Zero Defects are important, but the fourth – knowing the cost or Price of Non-Conformance – puts it all in perspective. In the contact center business, we know this cost. One misguided associate can create a penalty for one thousand. I’ve seen it happen.

Our training, supervision, coaching and verification programs have created a continuum of quality that allows us to be compliant. In our world, compliance isn’t good or great, it’s perfect. We’re bowling every game to score a 300.

As we all are seeing every day, the way in which we communicate with each other is changing dramatically.

I can now communicate with someone through five different technologies and never actually speak “live” with any of them.

Communicating through multiple channels with the people in your life – especially your customers – can be very powerful. The key is in how you plan to handle those interactions effectively and make them customer-focused, memorable AND drive additional revenue for your organization.

Many customers have their own preferred methods of communication so offering a broad approach to interaction can help you reach all segments of your customer base. The older generations tend to prefer traditional forms of communication like face-to-face and phone. The younger generation more often embraces the newest forms of technology in our society like texting, chat and email.

How does a company effectively and efficiently interact with customers who have varying interests in communication? You partner with someone who can reach out to them all, through the target channels you need.

GCS can provide any or all of those services to your customer base through our service delivery technology and diverse contact center locations.
Sales or service, voice or non-voice, if it can be done from a workstation, we can handle it! Our centers are equipped with the technology to provide any customer interaction service from a singe, unified desktop. We also have the technology to blend any transaction type at the same desktop to create maximum effectiveness with handling the transactions and maximum efficiency of resources.

Our representatives have been educated to handle any number of customer transactions with the technology enabling them to focus on each transaction based on its timeliness, importance of transaction, and even skill the transaction based on the education level of the representatives to insure maximum results AND customer satisfaction.

If you already have applications built and simply want to extend those to GCS for transaction handling/processing, we can quickly and easily accommodate your needs. Our expert technology services team can evaluate the options and propose the easiest and most cost effective solutions for you that will be designed to increase efficiency and lower your overall costs.

Whether the interaction is e-mail, chat, voice, text, etc., we have the competencies to provide all of these services from any of our locations. We can also process transactions where Spanish and other language skills are required.

When you think of GCS and consider us as a potential outsourced partner, remember: any transaction is possible. Sales or service, voice or non-voice, if it can be done from a workstation, we can handle it!