Sento Contact Center

January 2004 - AMERICAN FORK, Utah - Customer service outsourcing firm Sento Corp., has been designated a Certified Center of Excellence by BenchmarkPortal, and the Center for Customer-Driven Quality at Purdue University.Dr. Jon Anton, Benchmark Research Director at Purdue’s Center for Customer-Driven Quality, presented Sento with the certification at an awards luncheon during Purdue University’s recent “Call Center Campus” Conference in Las Vegas.

“This certification attests to the fact that Sento call center managers have successfully balanced efficiency and effectiveness in their operations,” said Anton. “By optimizing their cost components and their ability to satisfy customers, they exemplify best practices in a very important consumer products sector.”

“Sento is the first contact point for many of our clients’ customers. The role we play in delivering service and support is critical to the satisfaction of each individual customer.” said Patrick F. O’Neal, president and chief executive officer of Sento. “This unique certification award validates Sento’s effort and dedication to providing best-in-class solutions to all of our corporate clients.”

The certification is based on best-practice metrics drawn from the world’s largest database of call center performance metrics. Centers that attain certification do so on the basis of objective, quantitative data, which is audited and validated by researchers from BenchmarkPortal and the Purdue University Center of Customer-Driven Quality.

Anita Rockwell, BenchmarkPortal’s director of business intelligence, worked closely with the Sento quality team to validate the center’s performance metrics, and she continues as a key adviser on additional areas of improvement opportunity.

“Sento’s dedication enabled them to attain certification in less than 90 days,” Rockwell said. “Their investment in benchmarking and certification cost them less than .02 percent of their overall gross savings achieved within the first five months. This once more proved that certification is not just a quality award. The fact is that our certified centers function at the lowest possible annual operational expense by balancing call quantity and call quality.”

Sento call centers have more than 750 agents and support personnel, and are capable of handling approximately 10 million calls per year.

BenchmarkPortal, Inc. is the custodian of the Purdue University Center for Customer-Driven Quality database of contact center performance metrics, the largest such database in the world, according to Anton. BenchmarkPortal provides industry benchmark reports, customer experience benchmark reports, and advisory services for contact centers in the areas of operational metrics, customer satisfaction measurement and agent satisfaction measurement.