Originally founded as a retail ISP, GTN Communications provides award-winning service by maintaining flexibility in response to its customers' evolving needs.

by Jeff Goldman [June 11, 2003]

GTN Communications was founded in 1996 as an ISP, using direct response television advertising to market its services. According to Val Morgan, GTN's President and CEO, AT&T's announcement of a low-cost, all-you-can-eat offering soon pushed GTN out of the market as an ISP, but it had already established its call center infrastructure—so GTN simply shifted gears and went into the outsourced call center business.

The company now provides call center services to about 5 webhosting companies and 17 ISPs, some of which run their own VISP networks. "We've had a good seven years of experience at doing this," Morgan said. "Still, we're not what you'd call one of the larger organizations, so people don't get lost in here; our clients have a sense that they're getting hands-on service."

GTN Communications Voice: (800) 690-7102 sales@callgtn.com

According to Morgan, GTN is able to provide the same level of service that a larger provider can, with the benefit of greater flexibility. "We have an in-house software development team," she said. "We have our own proprietary ticket management system that we customize for our clients. Being an outsourcer, you need to be nimble on your feet and able to help the client in whatever way they need at that particular moment."

Coming from the ISP space, she adds, has proven an asset for the company. "The entire culture of our company is focused on the Internet, and I think that has set us apart for quite a long time in that we really know that business," Morgan said. "We really know what the issues are for ISPs and webhosting companies, and we've handled millions of interactions."

In 2001, GTN won Customer Interface Magazine's Award for Customer Contact Excellence for Best Business-to-Business Inbound Program for its work with Webhosting.com. "That was a situation where we had jumped in and dropped their call volume by 50 percent, because we were able to provide good first call resolution with very little information from the client side," Morgan said.

Flexibility and customization
GTN is able to provide services in English, French, and Spanish, and offers telephone support, e-mail support, and online chat, as well as a broad range of reporting options. "We provide our clients with the use of our own ticketing system and online web reporting," Morgan said. "They can go to our web administrative portal, check on the status of tickets, and follow the activity of their queue live."

The online reporting system, Morgan says, is extensively customized for each client. "That's done up-front before we actually start providing the services," she said. "But if people go down the road six months or a year later and decide, 'You know what, I'd really like to be able to do this differently,' we can accommodate that as well."

Pricing for the services can be structured per minute, per subscriber, or per call. Morgan says per-subscriber pricing is best for smaller companies, while per-minute makes more sense for larger providers who are likely to have a lower call volume per customer. "Their systems are more stable, they're more familiar with managing their service, and their customers aren't going to be calling in as much," she said.

"When a contact center is offering a per subscriber-model, they have to build in a little bit of wiggle room on that price, because it's based on the understanding of a percentage of customers calling in over the month," Morgan said. "Once you get more stable and not as many customers are calling in, then you're probably losing on the per-subscriber model, and you should be moving over to the per-minute model."

Three different service levels are also available, with pricing to match. The top level guarantees that 80 percent of calls are answered in 30 seconds, with 8 percent abandoned. The middle range offers 70 percent of calls answered in 60 seconds with a 10 percent abandon rate; the lower level is 85 percent of calls answered in 120 seconds with a 15 percent abandon rate.

Staying informed
Morgan has one plea to make to ISPs seeking an outsourced call center provider: "The more information the contact center has, the better service they can provide for you as an ISP," she said. "We've had many companies forget to tell us when they're making huge changes: For example, we've even had clients that changed all their access numbers and forgot to tell us."

Still, it's GTN's ability to stay on top of that kind of information that has kept it competitive, and Morgan suggests that the company's small size has been key to that flexibility. GTN's 2001 ACCE award was given in recognition of its ability to quickly solve problems presented by a new customer with a huge backlog of support e-mails and customer issues.

Most customers, though, simply come to GTN with a need for outsourced services, not a backlog of support issues. Curt Cranfield is President and CEO of IP Applications, an outsourced IT services provider based in Vancouver, British Columbia. The company has been working with GTN since 2001, using GTN as a subcontractor to provide outsourced support services to its customers.

Whenever IP Applications works with a new vendor, Cranfield says, they start by giving them a small piece of the pie to see how customers respond to their services. "GTN has done extremely well, so we keep giving them larger and larger slices," he said. "They provide excellent customer service, and they're quite reasonably priced."

And according to Cranfield, GTN's origins as an ISP are a great asset to their offering. "They really know the ISP space," he said. "There are a lot of companies out there trying to provide support to ISPs, and not many of them really understand the business and how to provide the support that those customers need. GTN does a great job of that."

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