McFarland, WI - September 2005 - In the devastation left in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the National AMTELCO Equipment Owners (NAEO) group has stepped up to offer assistance for the Gulf Coast area, and specifically for the many telephone answering service employees now left jobless. NAEO has gone far beyond their “Members Helping Members” slogan by bringing the entire telephone answering service industry together to provide help to fellow industry members that were affected.

Efficiently Handling Thousands of Calls Each Hour
As urgent appeals went out from the Red Cross and other agencies, a number of NAEO members geared up their staff members, and their systems, to handle the immense traffic load for these agencies. According to NAEO member Michael Leibowitz, owner of Professional Answering Service in Charleston, South Carolina, “Infinity was very good to us this week during the Katrina aftermath. IS [Infinity Intelligent Series] was incredible – we put new, complicated accounts on-line in minutes, and the DB connectivity made it almost too easy. Most of the accounts were for taking donations, and we could store the info in SQL and get the files out to the Red Cross and other agencies. When the main Red Cross Web site for call center agents to enter donations went down, we were able to build an Infinity IS script with ‘DB Save’ in just 5 minutes.”

A number of Infinity features are helping keep callers informed and easing call traffic, such as the Average Time To Answer (ATTA) announcement, which lets callers know approximately how long they will be waiting for an operator. Mr. Leibowitz reported, “We had almost 0 abandons from people calling to make donations – even from people on hold 10 minutes.”

He continued, “We did B-channel transfers for people in distress. Perfect. We also did Web pops to eCreator, in-house Web sites, and external Web sites. No problems. We used overflow voice scripting at times. The only tool we didn’t use (this time) was abandon eliminator. We even sent some Infinity Voice Logger recordings to the media so they could hear how well our operators were doing.”

“May I Help You?”
After hearing of the devastation suffered by an answering service’s workers, NAEO members quickly reacted by setting up an Operator Relief Fund “to help those that say ‘May I help you?’ hundreds of times a day.” According to Marci Imes, current NAEO President, “Our industry is comprised of giving individuals whose work is to assist others every day of the year over the telephone. As an industry, we immediately recognized that many call center staff members were impacted by Katrina, and we needed to find a way to help those who have helped so many over the years.”

Although contributions are not tax-deductible, thousands of dollars have already been contributed by NAEO members, ATSI members, CAM-X members, and members of many other industry associations.

Helping Displaced Workers
Betty Bouchie, Infinity System Analyst at Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Centre in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and the NAEO Operator Relief Fund Coordinator, has created a list of those answering services able to employ skilled operators, both near the Gulf Coast area, as well as in areas further away. According to Ms. Bouchie, “We have a number of call centers who have offered to re-locate call center workers, often including housing as well as a paycheck, while the details of their new lives can be planned. In addition, we have the ability to distribute funds collected from our industry members to those in need. As communication within the region gets better each day, we have a team working closely to contact and locate call centers in the area. We hope to reach as many call center workers as possible.”

For more information on NAEO, and the NAEO Operator Relief Fund, e-mail NAEO at donations@naeo.org, visit www.naeo.com, or call (800)809-6373, extension 2. For more information on the 1Call Infinity system, contact 1Call at (800)356-9148, or e-mail info@1call.com.