“A WIN-WIN SITUATION”

Text-relay operations at CSD’s Jacksonville, Florida call center are being expanded to include additional work shifts, beginning this July. The expansion will add approximately 100 new jobs, nearly doubling the current number of employees at the facility. While some of the jobs may be filled with current CSD employees from other facilities, a majority of the jobs are expected to be filled with new hires from the local area. The Jacksonville TRS center, opened in May 2005, has the potential capacity to employ up to 500 employees, should continued expansion be warranted.

Telecommunication relay services (TRS) is designed to make the telephone industry accessible to deaf, hard-of-hearing, and speech-disabled people. Highly trained relay operators serve as professional intermediaries, relaying phone conversations back and forth between standard voice telephone users and TTY users. In a typical call, the relay operator or communication assistant (CA) reads aloud words typed and transmitted electronically by a deaf person and then immediately transcribes the hearing person’s spoken response, which appears on the TTY screen of the deaf caller. Callers can use the Florida Relay Service by dialing 7-1-1 or 800-955-877, or they can also use the Internet to make a text-relay call. There is no charge for using the relay service (other than standard long-distance charges, if applicable).

Benjamin Soukup, president and chief executive officer of CSD, said: “We see this expansion as a win-win situation for everyone concerned, including our TRS partners, our internal TRS network, the employees, and of course, the city of Jacksonville. We have already demonstrated how flexible, highly productive and dependable the current workforce is in the center, and we are pleased that this expansion will give us an even greater presence in the area.”

The Jacksonville call center is one of 11 TRS call centers within the CSD network. Certain centers operate around-the-clock offering service to the nation’s deaf and hard-of-hearing callers who rely on the service for telephone access. CSD partners with Sprint to provide much of the TRS technology and engineering support. Together, they contractually service more than half of the country, processing millions of relay calls each month, making them the largest TRS provider in the country.

“It is going to be quite a challenge to ramp up quickly and increase the number of CAs as needed in a relatively short period of time, but the Jacksonville team is glad to be taking on that challenge,” said Jim Skjeveland, TRS chief operations manager. “We are honored to have been selected by our partners to take on the additional traffic at this particular center (which prompted the expansion), and we will do whatever we need to do in order to meet the expectations.”

Posted: June 25, 2006