Okay - so we're not perfect!

That’s right, sadly, our twenty-six months of 100% accuracy has come to an end. Now, I have to say, I’m still unbelievably proud that Tele-Tech achieved such a phenomenal milestone – and, I thank our team for all their efforts.

So - now we start again! A new challenge is on the horizon. Can we meet – even beat – our two-year record? Our path to perfection (again) begins; and, in doing so, we’ll take pause to examine what errors were found and how they occurred. This is what we’ve discovered thus far:

• We found errors in our data for Extended Local Calling (ELC) exchanges in Texas. Here’s what happened – we pull ELC exchange information from the Texas Public Utilities Commission; and, unfortunately, the TX PUC didn't update the spreadsheet with a few specific exchanges, and a tariff update is not generally issued for the additional of a few ELC exchanges. The result is that we were not aware these ELCs were local until CenturyTel and Embarq merged and the new company, CenturyLink issued a new tariff on 1-1-10., The new tariff included the ELC exchanges in question. Since this discovery, we have been evaluating comparison tools and will incorporate the most effective in a filtering process to identify changes within new tariff documents.
• An error in an extended metro calling area was not discovered during our normal internal verification process, and was therefore released to our live data set. Because we feel this instance to be a bit uncharacteristic, we find it a good example to incorporate into our mock calling area exercises for Tele-Tech researchers. Certainly, we hope to use this error as a learning experience; but, to ensure it doesn’t happen again, we have also implemented additional verification procedures.
• Finally, errors were made because of a cross-state border exchange. Essentially, there is a Virgilina, VA, and a Virgilina, NC, with the same coordinates. Erroneously, we did not include Virgilina, NC, in the local calling areas for rate centers that included Virgilina, VA, as local calls. We are making both programming and reporting changes that will alert when there are rate centers with the same coordinates (but not included in the same calling area).

Now, we often reference our "Quality Story", and I’ll do so again by saying… we have a sincere believe in conducting a full examination of errors made! And, especially after going so long without any errors – we really wanted to get to the source of those recently discovered to ensure we put precautionary steps in place preventing reoccurrence. So…. we pulled that swinging spotlight out and we’re rotating our employees under the glare – kidding! BUT, we’re not kidding about our committed belief that examining errors is our best teacher in allowing us to determine how the error happened -- and, how to adjust our processes and/or software so that the same type of error cannot happen again.

So, we’re no longer at 100% perfect accuracy – but, we enjoyed the ride so much, we’re determined to take it again! And – as we say in our 12-step program for addiction to data quality, we strive to make successful processes repeatable…. so, we start anew, with our twenty-four month accuracy rating now at 99.94%.