CRC, your after-hours connection to SVEC
On an average evening the Dunlap CRC office may have only a half dozen CSR’s on duty but overflow calls can be answered by the MN office and they have work stations for more than twice as many CSR’s if the need arises.
When you call in to SVEC after-hours, weekends and holidays, your call is answered by one of the customer service representatives employed by our business partner,
Cooperative Response Center, Inc. (CRC).
What is CRC and where is it located? CRC is a 24-hour customer contact center and central station providing a wide array of innovative teleservices and products. Among these services is an after-hours telephone answering service similar to the service that you might get if you call your doctor’s office, the telephone company, or your home alarm company after-hours. However, CRC works primarily for
electric utilities and has an understanding of the kinds of questions and needs a utility customer might have after-hours.
Their headquarters office is in Austin, Minnesota, however, the calls from the SVEC service area
go
to the Dunlap call center. SVEC was instrumental in CRC’s decision to locate the regional call center here in the Sequatchie Valley. This decision brought 20-25 new jobs to our service
area in 2001. The center continues to employ about 20.
Who owns CRC? Since CRC is a cooperative and cooperatives are owned by the people who use its services, you are an owner. More specifically the
200 plus members/associate members who use CRC’s services are the
member-owners. As an owner of SVEC that makes you an owner of CRC as well.
Why do we use CRC? That question might best be answered by one of the founders of the cooperative, Ron Steckman, president of a cooperative in Minnesota, when he stated “In forming CRC, we realized no co-op working alone could afford to offer this level of service. In addition to providing high volume call answering during storm situations, CRC is trained to respond to billing and sales inquiries, thereby extending our office hours. By sharing ownership of CRC, we’ve made this service accessible to cooperatives nationwide.”
Incoming calls come in on several lines and are answered by a number of different customer service representatives who then route them to a different employee to dispatch out. It is a much more efficient system to handle
an outage than the old system of having one employee per district to handle after-hours calls from their home with no access to our computer database. However outages are not the only kinds of calls CRC takes.
With more and more people working hours other than 8:00 to 4:30 often after-hours or weekends the only time a person has to call to make a billing inquiry or to ask questions about products and services that the co-op offers. Because CRC is hooked in with our billing service they are equipped to answer some of these questions. Questions that they can not answer are faxed into our local offices and answered by SVEC employees the next business day.
Our partnership with CRC is just another way SVEC is trying to make YOUR cooperative more
accessible and easier to do business with.
