Region's Largest Call Centre Opens

Atlantic Canada's largest tele-service centre officially opened in Dartmouth today. Matrixx Marketing Customer Care Canada is operating out of a newly renovated, state-of-the-art facility in Highfield Park.

Matrixx has hired and trained almost 700 Nova Scotians since August. That number is expected to rise to 1,200 in the new year. Already, several of the early recruits have been promoted to supervisory positions.

"We're extremely pleased with the quality of employees we're finding here in Nova Scotia," said Monica Mehan, president of communication alliances with Convergys, the parent company of Matrixx Marketing. "In fact, the quality and depth of the labour pool is as good as it gets in the industry."

The 6,000-square-metre (66,000-square-foot) centre operates round the clock, seven days a week. More than 500 workstations are equipped to handle 20 million calls a year. The company has installed a network switch that is powerful enough to manage all of the telephone calls made in Dartmouth.

"This is an excellent place for our new call centre," said Dale Robinson, director of the Matrixx operation. "The excellence of the educational institutions, the modern communications infrastructure and the willingness of provincial leaders to support economic expansion make Nova Scotia a great place to do business. This operation is the direct result of close collaboration between business, government and education to meet the strategic needs of each."

The Matrixx centre opened with the assistance of the provincial government. Economic Development and Tourism is investing in the training and recruitment of employees by reimbursing the company 12 per cent of its payroll costs at the end of each of the next five years, after salaries have been paid.

"This is an excellent investment for the province," said Premier Russell MacLellan. "These are good jobs with a leading company in an industry that's undergoing explosive growth. Our investment in this centre is creating more revenues for the province, for our health care system and our schools."

The operation is currently providing customer support to a single AT&T client, which has more than 4,000 tele-service associates working on its behalf throughout North America. The Nova Scotia operation deals exclusively with incoming calls from AT&T customers.

Matrixx Marketing is part of Convergys Corp., a customer-care and billing operation with its head office in Cincinnati. Convergys employs more than 30,000 people at its 43 call centres, data centres and other offices in the United States, Canada and Europe. The company processes more than a million bills and more than a million calls each day for top companies in the communications, technology, consumer products, financial services, utilities, health care and hospitality industries.