Professional Experiences and Experienced Professionals
How can Drake understand your business problems if we don't understand the business you are in?

Optimizing Performance through Partnership and People
The Drake Contact Center Practice consists of industry experts who know contact centers and are able to develop solutions based on the unique needs of each client.

We have built upon 50+ years of people expertise to provide solutions for the contact center world. Incorporating best practices for workforce solutions, performance management, and web-enabled technologies, this expertise extends to delivering soft and hard skill contact center solutions delivered on-line, computer based, or in leader-led formats.

Our proprietary collaborative internet software allows us to further enhance contact performance by enabling visual real-time interaction for distance training, web seminars, e-mentoring, and customer e-commerce interface right at the agents desktop.

We use a consultative process to identify performance improvement opportunities and to define and develop solution requirements.

• Productivity
• Quality
• Sales results
• Customer satisfaction
• Employee satisfaction
• Employee retention

Our process starts with gaining an executive level understanding of the corporate vision, and challenges and opportunities as they relate to your center. We then go into the center to complete an on-site analysis, observation and assessment process. Through gap analysis and needs determination, we then collaboratively work with our clients to develop performance enhancing solutions.

Workforce Solutions
The most important component of the contact center continues to be the human factor. It is critical to have the right staff to manage, measure, interact with the customer, and drive the over-all performance of the center.

Having the right combination of people, processes, partnerships and technologies enables a contact center to achieve high performance. Being able to understand their interaction and interdependence is an essential component of achieving success, whether the goal is to drive performance in a single center or to implement an enterprise wide customer contact management program.

The Drake Contact Center Practice is focused on delivering solutions to clients that will result in an overall performance improvement for their center.

Through a unique Gap Analysis process, we take a very close look at your team to help:

• develop a behavioral profile that represents the "Recipe for Success" in your team
• identify core competencies that are key to an individual performing their job successfully
• customize assessment programs to ensure that all individuals are measured objectively against a standardized process
• ensure that the right tools are in place to support the ongoing education and coaching of your front line resources

Staffing
At Drake, people are our vehicle to achieving high performance. Whether staffing needs are for permanent, part-time, flexible or a totally outsourced solution, Drake has the depth of resources to provide staff with the appropriate skills and right "corporate fit" for today's contact center operations.

From customer service to web integrated centers, we understand that managing the peaks and valleys of seasonal, weekly and even daily staffing needs can be a difficult task.

Recruitment
To make the right choices, organizations must look far beyond a candidates' perceived talents. It must be determined that candidates have the proven skills as well as those harder-to-assess values and attributes that provide for a good fit into corporate culture.

Drake uses the most advanced behavioral descriptive interviewing techniques and powerful assessment technologies that dig deeper than any other tools in the market. We ensure that candidates have the skills and the attributes to thrive and contribute to an organization's success.

We supply all levels and functions of contact center staff, including:

• Directors
• Center Managers
• Team Leaders / Supervisors
• Agents - Inbound / Outbound / Net
• CSRs
• Schedulers
• Forecasters
• Support Staff
• IT Staff / Helpdesk

Assessment
Striking the Perfect Fit between Personality and Ability

To ensure we provide you with agents who will provide the 'right fit' for your contact center operation, Drake provides assessment analysis to measure how each candidate meets your criteria. This analysis brings new precision to your recruiting decisions by measuring knowledge, skills, behavior and personality traits of candidates before you hire them. The net result - you reduce the need to make staffing decisions based on gut feel and hire with confidence. Staff retention is increased substantially by making the right hiring decisions.

On-Line Assessment
It's important to keep a competitive edge in today's business marketplace. Global solutions have become necessary. With Webassessor.com, you have the capability to reliably measure the abilities, attitudes and product knowledge of your contact center agents from anywhere in the world, at any time.

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News Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

TORONTO (July 30,1999) - Bell Canada today announced a strategic partnership with Drake International to deliver end-to-end Contact Centre hiring, recruiting and training services across North America and overseas.

Under the agreement, Drake will market and deliver Bell's leading edge contact centre training courses to customers in North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, in addition to providing a complete package of hiring and recruiting services. The two companies will now be able to offer end-to-end human resources solutions to multi-national customers with customer contact centre locations around the world.

"In partnership with Drake, we will now provide a complete package of human resources solutions to our contact centre customers and extend this capability to customers overseas," said Bruce Attridge, Regional VP -Contact Centre Solutions, Bell Canada. "The combination of Bell's expertise in customer contact centre solutions with Drake's strength in human resources means we will better be able to meet our customers' overall needs."

These capabilities are becoming increasingly important as the scope and complexity of contact centre activities expand. This means that contact centres will need increasingly skilled and well-trained employees.

As businesses grow across international boundaries and time zones, many have turned to contact centres to provide cost effective customer service on a 7 day-a-week, 24 hour-a-day basis. In many cases, this involves multiple contact centre locations in the three key international areas - North America, Europe and the Asia Pacific region.

One key challenge for these contact centres is providing consistent customer service levels enterprise-wide when contact centres may be in different time zones, countries and experiencing varied hiring and cultural practices. With labour costs accounting for 65% - 75% of operating costs in most contact centres, customers are looking for effective solutions that will recognize these cultural differences.

Multi-national companies prefer the call answer location to be transparent to the customer, with consistent standards at all locations.

"By partnering with Bell, we are confident that we can better assist contact centres to meet the challenges of the international marketplace with greater success than ever before," said Bill Pollock, Chairman and CEO, Drake International. "Together, Bell and Drake form an unbeatable team to leverage the tremendous opportunities in this fast-growing industry."

Services available through the partnership will be provided on-site at the customers' premises and in the classroom.

Drake offers "state of the art" assessment tools, effective in helping call centres select only the most desirable candidates - resulting in better retention rates of agents, a more streamlined hiring process, lower training costs and a presence in 13 countries including Australia, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the U.S.

Drake was established in 1951 and has since grown to become a global organization recognized as a world leader for it's expertise in enabling companies to improve their profitability and productivity through flexible staffing, permanent recruitment, training and development.

Bell Canada, the largest Canadian telecommunications operating company, markets a full range of state-of-the-art products and services to more than seven million business and residential customers in Ontario and Quebec. Bell Canada's Internet web site is located at: http://www.bell.ca. News releases, speeches and background information are in the Newsroom under the About Bell main menu. Our e-mail address is forum@bell.ca

For further information, please contact:

Samantha Ouimet
Bell Canada Media Relations (Ontario)
(416) 581-4906 or 1-888-482-0809
E-mail: samantha.ouimet@bell.ca

Paul Hindle
Drake International
416-216-1000
E-mail: phindle@na.drakeintl.com