The Philadelphia Church of God call center celebrated its fifteenth year of operation this summer. The operation has spent more than 52,000 man-hours on the line and registered more than 2 million calls since it moved to its current location at the Mail Processing Center in 2004. Call center manager Harley Breth took the opportunity to reflect on the department’s history.
EDMOND—On July 20, 2000, a furious 90 mile-per-hour windstorm raged through central Oklahoma, destroying trees and downing power lines. The next morning, a Friday, PCG staff members walked into a headquarters facility that was without power and without telephone service. This is the situation that faced the Church’s new call answering center when it was just two days old.
Responses to the Key of David television program would be coming in the following morning. But the call center was knocked out before it had even gone live.
The staff went to work to try to bring the system back online in time for its first ring-in. By Friday evening, diligence, resourcefulness, and more than a little help from God brought the phones back up.
A week and a half later, Key of David presenter and PCG Pastor General Gerald Flurry wrote a letter to Church members about the birth of the call center.
“That night, another windstorm—an exact replica of the one that hit the night before—again pounded central Oklahoma. [M]ore than 40,000 homes in the Oklahoma City area were without power all weekend. OG&E reported that it was the worst power outage they had ever dealt with in Oklahoma. But this time, miraculously, God protected our equipment, and our operators were able to take calls at 6 a.m. Saturday morning ….” (August 1, 2000).
“Satan tried very hard to stop our call center from getting off the ground,” Mr. Flurry said, ‘but God did not allow it. Satan knows how important this step is for God’s Work’” (Philadelphia News, September/October 2000).
The Need for a Call Center
That important step first began in early 1998. The PCG was printing, advertising and freely distributing Mystery of the Ages, by Herbert W. Armstrong. Twelve headquarters staff members took more than 1,500 toll-free telephone calls in response to newspaper ads for the book.
Mr. Flurry then advertised the toll-free number nationwide on The Key of David. In anticipation of the response, he opted to avoid the startup cost of establishing an in-house call center and instead contracted with a call center in Pittsburgh.
The arrangement cost about $1,000 up front and served as a test to determine if the Church should continue to outsource this project, or if it should take on the cost of establishing its operation.
“[W]e felt confident that the call center could handle the estimated 1,000 calls that would come in if we ran the 800 number nationwide,” staff member Shane Granger wrote in the Philadelphia News (May-June 1998). “But we were shocked when Mr. Flurry’s ‘Return of the Nazis’ program offering the new Germany booklet pulled in a whopping 1,805 calls! And on the following Monday the phones were still busy! Our total came to 2,083 requests.”
By late 1999, the decision was made: For the best quality and the most efficient cost efficiency, the PCG needed its own call center. In March 2000, the Church purchased the hardware and software for the project. In early June, it had its 46-line digital telephone system up and running at its office complex in downtown Edmond.
As the hardware and software was coming online, training for the telephone operators began in earnest. More than a third of the headquarters congregation signed up: a total of 45 volunteers.
Granger, who served as call center coordinator, recruited and trained the volunteers, writing manuals and supervising operations. It was not entirely new territory for him; he had experience serving in the original Wide Area Telephone Service program pioneered by the Worldwide Church of God.
But getting the system and the operators ready was just the beginning. And if adversity won out, that was also going to be the end.
Up and Down and Up and Running
July 20 and 21 brought the two consecutive violent windstorms that rocked the Edmond area. Following the timely effort to bring the system back online in time to answer the first of its calls, department head Andrew Locher said, “Mr. Flurry told me he felt the violent storms were a result of Satan’s anger over our having built the new call center—and that he now knew his decision to begin a wats operation in Edmond was the right thing to do’” (Philadelphia News, September/October 2000).
The Key of David aired, dozens of call center phones began beeping, and the Church volunteers reached for their connect buttons. The call center was online.
In addition to cost efficiency, staffing the call center with a team of Church members meant a more motivated and sincere operator for each caller who dialed in.
“Having our own people answer the phones will make a huge difference in our message reaching the masses,” Mr. Flurry wrote in an August 2000 letter to Church members. “I believe it will probably double or triple the Key of David’s effectiveness. The reason is because our people will work extremely hard to serve the callers. And they will never be curt or rude.”
The call center received its first full-time operator later that summer: Mark Jenkins. And when Granger moved to different duties, he passed the telephone to Andrew Hessong.
November 2001 brought a new tool for the call center, a contact management program called Scepter that helped merge the records of the multiple databases used throughout headquarters.
The workload soon exceeded the capacity of the headquarters work force, and it became clear that an in-home operator program patterned after the Worldwide Church of God model was a necessity. The in-home program began in February 2002.
In the spring of 2004, the call center joined the mail, television and CD duplication departments at a new, purpose-built facility on the Church’s new headquarters campus in north Edmond. The call center in its current configuration at the Mail Processing Center answered its first call on April 25, 2004.
Meanwhile, the in-home operator program continued to grow. Today, five full-time operators, 20 weekend student operators and 110 in-home operators answer thousands of calls every week.
In January of 2014, the department began discussing an update to its virtual call center software, and the improved system went into service in the summer, improving operations and reducing the complexity of managing the pool of operators.
In mid-February 2015, the information services department began rolling out a new version of a data entry website for the in-home operators to select operators for testing; it was released to all in-home operators in March and improved the process for both the operators in the field and the supervisors at headquarters.
2014 Statistics
Call center statistics for last year show that what started as a 46-line operation battling against the elements has grown to a much larger force for the Church’s work.
• 17,500—Average calls per month from all sources
• 49,900—Average minutes per month spent on the phone by PCG operators
• 21%—Percent increase in call minutes over 2010
• 18—Key of David programs that surpassed the average response for 2013
Branching Out
As the call center marked a decade and a half of history, the PCG was in the process of raising up a brand-new call center at its new campus in Warwickshire, England. The facility at the Edstone estate consists of 10 operators per weekend dedicated to answering response to The Key of David UK from interested viewers in Britain.
If the Edmond call center is representative, the Edstone operators can expect to be part of a pattern of expansion and growth, come whatever storms that may.
An Antecedent and an Aspiration
On a summer day in 1982, Worldwide Church of God staff members from the Church’s media department and call center welcomed a special visitor: Pastor General Herbert Armstrong. Mr. Armstrong toured the cubicles at the call center at the Pasadena headquarters campus, where nearly 100 operators were answering calls coming in in response to Mr. Armstrong’s World Tomorrow television program.
“This year, we’re on twice as many stations as last year, but the calls have tripled,” Media Services director Larry Omasta reported to Mr. Armstrong. “Last year, we were averaging about 2,700 calls per program; this year, we’re averaging about 7,700 calls per program.”
In 1986, the year Mr. Armstrong died, 27 out of 52 World Tomorrow programs surpassed 26,000 calls. For the year, the call center received a gargantuan number of calls: nearly 2 million.