Success Stories - Twin Cities Development Association, Inc. - Nebraska: Scottsbluff, Gering, TerryTown, Mitchell, Bayard

ALLIANCE DATA SYSTEMS/ORCOM

Alliance Data Systems, formerly Orcom, is an electronic communications company that provides customer information services and billing for utility companies across the United States. In 1999 the company employed more than 200 workers in Scottsbluff and applied for LB840 funding to expand and add 70 new positions.

From Communications Convergence.com

Alliance Acquires Orcom
By Brendan B. Read
12/17/2003

Utility deregulation is creating the need for outsourced call center services as firms shed what they see as ancillary operations to focus on their core competencies.

...Alliance Data Systems (Dallas, TX), a provider of transaction services, credit services and marketing services, has acquired Orcom, an outsourcing company specializing in mainly municipal utility customer care and billing services.

Orcom has approximately 400 employees in call centers in Colorado, Nebraska and Pennsylvania serving a number of utility clients. It is expected to generate core revenues to Alliance of at least $30 million per year.

The first phase of Alliance's business strategy for the utility market targeted investor-owned utilities as well as deregulated utilities in North America's transitioning and deregulated markets. More recently, Alliance began an expansion into the large municipal utility market. With the Orcom acquisition Alliance has further extended its targeted market to include municipal utilities with 50,000 accounts or greater.

"Alliance has consistently demonstrated its ability to successfully serve deregulated utilities, large investor-owned and municipal utilities, as well as mid-market accounts and the sub-metering market," says Mike Beltz, president, Utility Services, Alliance Data Systems.

"This acquisition continues to broaden our utility product offering and extends our reach in the municipal market, which we view in particular as a prime opportunity for providing outsourced billing and customer care solutions."

Gering Courier

5/17/01

In today’s world of specialization, the ability to be everything to everyone just doesn’t seem to work, and it is that philosophy that drives ORCOM.

At a recent tour of their “service delivery center” at the corner of Broadway and South Beltline Highway in Scottsbluff, Jill Marquardt, public relations manager, and Don Booth, Manager of customer service, explained the operation.

Marquardt said the local center provides billing services, customer information services and customer credit collections for utility companies. At the Scottsbluff location, KN Energy, Washington Gas and Light Company in the greater District of Columbia and Virginia area, and Green Mountain Energy are the main customers.

Because of a variety of market factors, Marquardt said, it has become cost prohibitive for many utility companies to upgrade old systems to deal with the customer service demands. Labor and technology costs mean it has become cost prohibitive to conduct such businesses “in house.”

“It is not practical for them…and they decide to out-source with ORCOM,” Marquardt said.

“One of our major advantages,” Marquardt said, “is that we specialize just on utility companies. For over 20 years we have specialized on nothing but utilities. Our knowledge base is huge.”

Booth said 130 agents work in the call center, and another 140 employees are involved in systems administration, product support, and a variety of related capacities needed to operate the service center.

Training is key to the center. Each customer service representative is trained exclusively with one utility client. “We want the right people in the right place with the right skills,” Booth said. “I’m going to be very blunt in that we have some of the best people in this community working in this building,” Booth said, “and if we don’t have all of them, then we sure would like to have all of them.”

Booth says ORCOM is committed to staying in the community. “That goes back at one point when we were KN Energy, then Simple Choice, but Simple Choice went away and ORCOM stayed,” Booth said, “and actually grew and got a better direction on what our visions were, and we keenly defined as who did we want to service as customers.”

“The facilities were already here and we had LB 840 monies in place and felt a responsibility to stay.”

Expansion is always being considered. “We’re always talking about expansion,” Booth said. “If another client was to come on board, we would certainly analyze if we had enough room in this facility to build out or to accomplish that, or if we would need to buy another facility.”