On 1 April, Covilhã Municipal Council will approve the creation of CONT C - Covilhã New Technologies Operating Centre - which initially will include the establishment of a Teleperformance Contact Centre and a Vodafone technical and commercial structure.
The signing ceremony for the contracts will take place at 11:30 am on Tuesday 1 April in the Grand Chamber of the Town Hall, involving the Mayor of Covilhã, Carlos Pinto, the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Vodafone Portugal, António Carrapatoso, Teleperformance's Southern Europe Manager, Southern Europe and the Managing Director of Teleperformance, João Cardoso.
Vodafone will use this centre to meet the new needs of its Customer Care Service resulting from the growth of its customer base in recent years. By the end of this year, it is forecast that the centre will be processing around 10% of customer enquiries. One of the reasons for Vodafone's choice of Covilhã lies in the quality and educational level of human resources in that part of the country.
This important investment will lead to the creation of 300 jobs in the initial phase (start-up forecast for October 2008), possibly rising to 500 new jobs by 2010. The Contact Centre will have Vodafone's most advanced IP technology and provide customer services by phone, e-mail and chat to Vodafone customers as well as to other companies that also require high quality customer services.
With its latest generation technologies, CONT C puts Covilhã in the forefront of this type of facility, which has been pioneered by Parkurbis Science and Technology Park, which houses 30 new technology companies.
Vodafone was the first company in Portugal to offer Customer Care services 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and in 1998 obtained certification to standard ISO 9002, the first mobile telecommunications operator call centre to achieve this certification in Portugal.
Over the years, Vodafone's Customer Care Service has received a number of awards: Call Centre Trophy 2003, Trophy for Best Final Customer Satisfaction, Trophy for Best Customer Relationship Centre and Technological Innovation Prize 2006, Trophy for Best Customer Relationship Centre in the Telecommunications Sector and Trophy for Best Customer Relationship Centre 2007.
Currently, Vodafone has dedicated Contact Centres in Lisbon and Oporto and jointly managed Contact Centres in Lisbon, Braga, Setúbal and Gaia, which use the most advanced telecommunications technologies and together handle around 1 million calls a month.
The Teleperformance Group commenced operations in Portugal in February 2000 and currently runs an operation with 750 workstations and 1600 employees in the country. It is the largest outsourcing CRM and Contact Centre company in Portugal and one of the most dynamic in the sector, managing projects for Portugal's biggest companies in the financial, telecommunications, publications, utilities and government sectors.
The Teleperformance Group is the world leader in the Call Centre and Contact Centre sector. It has around 75,000 computerised workstations and over 83,000 employees in 281 Contact Centres in 45 countries. It operates programmes in over 66 languages and dialects, and counts some of the world's biggest companies in various business sectors among its clients.