Frequently Asked Questions

Does your contact center support 24/7 operations?
Yes we have facilities that operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week including all holidays.

What is the current capacity including equipment and call volume?
The current number of workstations and PCs is over 1,100. We have the ability to expand rapidly. The current annual call capacity is over 100 million calls a year.

Where are your contact centers located?
Our headquarters is located in Burnsville, Minnesota. Our five call centers are located in Holdrege, Nebraska; Jamestown, New York; Olean, New York; Penn Yan, New York, Rockford, Illinois and Burnsville, Minnesota.

What industry to do you primarily support?
The Connection has strong experience with diverse industries including broadband, cable, wireless and telecommunications, internet retailers, catalog, utilities, healthcare and pharmaceutical, financial, direct response and direct response television (DRTV).

What long distance carrier is your toll-free telephone service?
We use Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and Qwest to service more than 2,200 T1 lines.

Are any of the services offered by your company supported through a working partnership or strategic alliance with organizations outside your company?
The Connection has strategic partnerships with leading national fulfillment organizations. Although the fulfillment is provided through our partnerships, we manage the entire process for our clients by providing a single point of contact through their National Account Manager.

Do you have multilingual capabilities at any or all of your facilities?
Yes, we have bilingual agents who are fluent in English and Spanish at our New York facilities.

Are your contact centers workstations web-enabled?
Yes, our stations are 100% web-enabled with access to email.

What types of training programs are in place that are required by your agents prior to taking client calls?
Every agent goes through intensive new-hire training focusing on soft-skills and personal development. Additionally, all agents go through client specific training before taking program calls. Client specific training varies based on each client's goals and objectives. All agents must pass written exams and certification testing before taking live program calls. All training is developed with participation from our clients to ensure that all critical information and goals and objectives are clearly understood.

Do your agents receive continuing training throughout the year?
One of our core objectives is to consistently provide ongoing training for both our agents and our team supervisors and supervisors throughout the year. Ongoing training is done through one-to-one, focus groups, formal classroom and procedural updates on our client Intranet sites. The focus of these training sessions include customer service and support, sales and upsells and other client program specific objectives.

Do you have equipment to support remote call monitoring?
Yes, The Connection offers our clients fully automated remote monitoring, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. All clients are assigned a password that allows them to monitor their program. We prefer to conduct weekly or bi-weekly conference call monitoring sessions with our clients. The goal of the sessions is to assure that we are providing outstanding customer service and sales support and achieving desired goals and objectives. Having the quality assurance and client services departments on the call with the client aids in clear understanding of call quality as well as effective and immediate feedback. In addition to our remote monitoring capabilities, we also have the ability to digitally record all calls for enhanced quality.