Allied May Add Jobs at its Area Call Center

by Matt Glynn, News Business Reporter

Allied Interstate is preparing to expand its local work force to 300 employees. But Vikas Kapoor, the head of Allied's parent company, has even bigger plans in mind.

"If things go well, I would love to see it expand to two to three times that size," said Kapoor, president and chief executive officer of IntelliRisk Management Corp. (IRMC), during a Thursday visit to Buffalo.

The potential additional growth hinges on how well local employees perform for their customers, but the signs so far are positive, Kapoor said.

Allied is one of several call center operations run by IRMC handling work such as debt collection and customer service. Kapoor has ramped up IRMC's worldwide presence since becoming CEO in 2004.

As many call center industry jobs have migrated overseas, Kapoor outlined a strategy he calls segmentation, keeping complex work stateside, while sending basic, low-wage tasks offshore.

For collections work, high-balance, high-yield accounts would be handled in the United States, medium balance and yield work would be handled in Canada, and low balance and yield work would go to India, he said.

"The result is, the work that merits lower costs goes to India, and the work that is premium work that will require higher skills and pay higher wages stays right here in the U.S.," Kapoor said.

Buffalo is the first place in the United States where IRMC is expanding, he said. Kapoor said when he polled his management team of 14 people about where to expand first, they recommended Buffalo, for its "good workers and, more importantly, a great work ethic."

"That was good enough for me," he said.

IRMC is also implementing new employee incentive plans that he said will reward workers for their performance and help reduce turnover. The top performers in Buffalo will be able to earn more than $75,000 or $100,000 a year with such incentives, he said. Average workers at its call center here now make $25,000 to $35,000 annually.

Companies in the collections industry have their critics. Last year, Allied reached a settlement with the Minnesota State Attorney General's Office, which had filed suit against Allied and another company. Consumers had complained about tactics the companies had used in trying to collect debts over the phone, sometimes repeatedly calling the wrong person.

Christopher Dorval, executive vice president of marketing for IRMC, said the company has taken steps, through technology and its human resources team, to weed out the types of problems described in the Minnesota case.

"It is absolutely antithetical to the company values, because the client doesn't like it, either," Dorval said.

Employees of IRMC's companies are trained to work with the people they call on developing a long-term solution, Kapoor said.

"Most of the time we're dealing with folks in temporary difficulty," he said. "With the kinds of debt on which we collect, the challenge is not so much to collect the money right away, but to structure a way for the consumer to get back on an even keel over a period of time."

The company is also investing in technology to monitor employees' behavior on the phone, "to see if people are doing things that are either over-aggressive or wrong," he said.

"By and large, for the types of debt we collect in Buffalo, the level of sophistication in dealing with consumers tends to be very high," he added.

Kapoor said he is not concerned that the Buffalo area is becoming too saturated with call centers, thus making workers scarce and forcing up wages.

He said Allied will recruit experienced people as well as workers from outside the industry who have the right attributes and can be trained.

As for higher industry wages, Kapoor said he welcomes it: "To me, rising compensation is a positive sign, because it means I'm performing better and that's why I'm paying out more money."

Allied within 90 days plans to move its 50 jobs in Amherst to a vacant supermarket in Cheektowaga that is being converted to a call center. It has already announced plans to add 250 jobs there.