In an amazing demonstration of planning, employee loyalty and good old fashioned Canadian Maritime grit, VAS worked its way through the two-day squall with a near perfect service performance for its portfolio of 29 clients. “A snowstorm of this magnitude would have brought most call centers to their knees,” proclaimed Alicia Moran, VP Client Services & Results Delivery for Passkey International, Inc. VAS received similar praise from Brad Holland, Director of Customer Service at CenterPoint Energy/Minnegasco, one of VAS’ oldest clients, who said, “Their performance over the weekend was nothing less than spectacular, but also not surprising for VAS.” 

Rob Campbell, Director of Operations for VAS began planning for the storm on Saturday when weather reports confirmed that the province would be hit hard. Rob gives the following account of his team’s efforts:  “On Saturday afternoon, our Operations Control Center (OCC) alerted the PODs of the oncoming whether conditions and asked that they put all agents on call for Sunday and Monday. We gathered an ‘on-call’ list to ensure that we had back up for people who might be unable to get to work. We also pre-planned shift trades between employees that had long commutes and employees that live closer to their respective centers. We then recruited employees with four-wheel drive vehicles to provide their fellow employees, who drive smaller cars, a ride to work for their shift. Agents volunteered to work through their breaks, and Team Leaders manned the phones as well. We made sure that each facility’s parking lot was plowed so that employees had a place to park once they got to work and didn’t have to worry about digging out after their shift. We also maintained constant contact with Public Works managers in each community who helped us provide our employees with frequent updates on road conditions. We are very proud of our operations team, managers and agents. With everyone’s help, we were able to turn a potentially bad situation into a non-event for our clients.” 

“Snow storms are a call center manager’s worst nightmare”, proclaimed Nancy Lewis, Vice President of Customer Service and 12-year veteran of the customer care business. “Our performance during this storm is a testament to the power of teamwork.” In addition, Neri Basque, Executive Vice President of IT and Strategic Planning was very pleased with the performance of Aliant, Inc., VAS’ voice and data provider. “Our success with this storm is, in large part, due to the robust and resilient voice and data network provided to us by Aliant. Their relationship and support is very valuable to VAS.”