INDUSTRY

By Tony Centonze Agero, Inc. a call center which offers roadside assistance, as well as safety and security services, recently announced a $2 million expansion of its Clarksville facility. An investment that will create as many as 900 new jobs over the next five years.

“We are based out of Medford, Massachesetts,” said Will Fugette, Senior Director of Operations. “We currently have three contact center locations, two in Tennessee, and one in Tucson, AZ. We have about 800 employees in Clarksville, making it the largest of our centers. Over the next five years we are investing about $2 million for expansion at this location."

“When we came here in 2012, we only took part of that building in the business park. Since then, another tenant vacated, and we took over their lease, expanding our existing operations and creating another couple of hundred seats.”

Agero, Inc. is a business-to-business provider for driver assistance services. Its clients are primarily auto manufacturers and car insurance companies. To those clients, Agero, Inc. provides roadside assistance, accident management, connected vehicle services, and much more.

“Clarksville is a great example of all the lines of business within our company,” Fugette said. “Everything we do, is done at some scale, in Clarksville. From consumer affairs to basic roadside assistance to more technical tier-2 type work. All of it happens here." space, in the country. We do roughly 12 million requests for roadside assistance annually, and protect more than 115 million vehicles on the road today.”

Fugette actually moved here to open the site. “We did a nationwide search, looking at the labor markets and the talent pool, and we landed in Clarksville,” Fugette said. “We came to the job fairs first to see what the talent was like, and what type of people were here. We were instantly impressed with the candidate flow that we saw, and the diversity of the community, with APSU and Fort Campbell. We felt that this was the right place to be. When we opened this center. It wasn’t our largest, but the success we had with recruiting and hiring has allowed us to continue to increase the number of jobs, and expand the lines of business we do here.”

Agero, Inc. currently offers a variety of jobs from entry-level to mid-level, and even higher-end technical positions. Fugette says Clarksville has been a great fit for all the lines of work they do, and continues to provide a strong pipeline, bringing in lots of talented people.

“On a basic entry-level job, our employees are assisting a caller who needs a tow, or a jump-start, or maybe they locked their keys in the car. The associate identifies their coverage, from there, they dispatch that job out to our network of service providers across the country, and the service writer executes the call."

“Once you have that event, there can be subsequent additional needs. Next, there is accident-scene management, that’s a higher-level job, those associate’s are talking with the customer in real-time, getting the vehicle off the road, getting it to a repair facility, and seeing that job all the way through, until everything’s done, and the vehicle is returned to the customer.”

Fugette says initial training for entry level jobs takes about four weeks, which includes two weeks in the classroom and a week of on-the-job call-taking. Then there is a nesting period that takes them through their first 90 days of employment. At which time there are additional support resources available. Coaches and supervisors are helping throughout that initial period. From there, once they’ve mastered that entrylevel position, additional cross-training is offered.

“An employee may learn to dispatch very well for one of our clients, then, as they get more experienced and proficient we can add additional lines of work to them,” Fugette said. “From there, they can promote into lots of additional positions. We have consumer affairs jobs where they handle everything for the vehicle, from a customer service perspective. That can range from answering questions about how to program a phone into a vehicle’s radio system, to helping a customer who’s having a problem with the vehicle’s upholstery."

“From accident management, associates can move into an ultra-premium program, where they only support owners of ultra-premium vehicles. From there, they can promote into what we call tier-2."

“Clarksville is the home of our command center, a higher level of the tier-2 groups. A command center associate is completely empowered to do whatever they need to do to take care of their customers, be it, get them an Uber or Lyft to get them off the road, or send them a cup of coffee, basically, anything they need to do to make sure that event

Clarksville also has a great number of management and supervisory positions. “We are always hiring, especially as we head into the summer months,” Fugette said. “It’s our peak season, with drivers hitting the roads for business or vacation. We really start staffing-up early spring to prepare for the summer rush. After summer, there is a bit of a lull, but then we get into winter. With inclement weather across the nation we see spikes. Our demand is actually pretty consistent throughout the year."

“COVID-19 has affected us. In march, we made the decision to send 1,500 employees home. It took about two weeks to get our systems together, and hand out equipment to the employees who needed it. Those who had their own equipment were able to build a solution where they could use their own home computers. So, in about two weeks we were able to get about 1,500 people working from home."

“We still have about 100 associates across the country coming in to our sites. That might be because of where they lived, maybe they couldn’t get internet. Or, they didn’t have an environment conducive to them working at home, so they wanted to come to the workplace."

“Because we operate 24/7, we’ve only had a few employees on site at any given time. We’re able to socially-distance very well within our facilities. We continue today to work from home as we recruit, hire and train. We’re doing that virtually right now. We’re doing classes online, on-the-job training online, and we’re learning and adapting as we go. The safety of our employees has been a primary responsibility for us, and we’re operating very well.”

Fugette says, when volume dropped off at the beginning of the pandemic, they were able to maintain employment, and didn’t have to furlough any employees. “We were able to move people to parttime if they wanted,” Fugette said. “Now, what we’re seeing, as things have started to reopen, is the volume coming back. We’re starting to be very busy. We halted hiring at the beginning of the year because of COVID-19. We are now ramping-up extremely fast. We’re running two to three classes simultaneously in each of our locations, back to back, to make up for those staffing shortages, and get us back to where we need to be.”

Fugette says working from home has been very successful. “The first couple of weeks, as we worked through some technical challenges, we learned a lot. We had already started a small workfrom-home program in 2018. We were testing the technology, and had a small number of associate’s working from home."

“We had planned to expand that number to 500 or 600 employees in 2020. COVID-19 just forced us to accelerate our learning, and the tech. We were able to go from what we had planned to do by the end of this year with 500 or 600, to having 1,500 working from home, within a matter of weeks. It forced us to move aggressively, but we were fortunate to already have a lot of the logistics worked out for the transition."

“We are getting positive feedback from the employees. We do pulse surveys about every other month to find out how they’re feeling. Do they like working from home, how do they feel about COVID-19, etc.? So far, we’ve gotten very positive results. They are glad to be working, and they enjoy the peace-of-mind that working from home gives them. Contact centers can get very busy, and very full of people, not an ideal situation during a pandemic. They are very appreciative to be safe and still earning a living.”

Expansion will include about 900 people, some in the facility, some at home. Leadership is currently rethinking operations. “We don’t know what the new ‘normal’ will be,” Fugette said. “Our facility is prepared to accept all employees on-site, if needed, but we’re reevaluating our strategy, so it will most likely be a mix."

“Tennessee is very business-friendly. We’ve had a lot of success here. We’ve had great partnerships with state and local governments, as well as community organizations, in both Clarksville and the Tri-Cities area. We’ve found Tennessee to be a very welcoming environment, and a wealth of talent. We had such a great experience in Clarksville, when we opened our next location, we stayed in Tennessee."

“Each of our sites has a community involvement team, a committee made up of associates, supervisors and managers that live in that community. They look for opportunities to get involved with, things like Manna Cafe. Those who live in a community, know best its needs. They guide us on where to invest our time, money and volunteer hours. We do that very well. We have a strong presence in all our communities.”

For more information on job opportunities, go to: www.agero.com/careers.