Alliance Data Center Card Services achieves honor

For the 10th consecutive year, Alliance Data Card Services has achieved the Center of Excellence certification by BenchmarkPortal, a global provider of support services to the call center industry.

Alliance Data Card Services, with an office in Coeur d'Alene, is a division of the Plano, Texas-based Alliance Data.

The Center of Excellence designation is reserved for the top 10 percent of all customer care centers surveyed by BenchmarkPortal, and is based on best-practice metrics for quality, cost, efficiency, effectiveness and superior performance.

Alliance Data Card Services has received BenchmarkPortal's Center of Excellence ranking more times than any company or organization in the financial services and credit industry.

Alliance Data also received for the third year in a row top-10 honors in the "large centers" category on the "Top 100 BenchmarkPortal Call Centers" list, which compares the performance of centers throughout North America by evaluating key metrics against industry peers.

"We are thrilled to celebrate a decade of achieving the Center of Excellence certification as it is a direct reflection of Alliance Data's brand- and customer-centric approach to delivering outstanding service on behalf of our brand partners," said Sallie Komitor, chief customer officer for Alliance Data's Card Services business. "Through our unique retail heritage and culture of caring, we have a deep understanding of our brand partners and their customers, and we view our industry-leading customer care organization as a competitive differentiator and a tremendous asset on which we've built the trust of our brand partners."

In developing its call center measurement parameters, BenchmarkPortal found that 41 Key Performance Indicators strongly correlate to the quality and quantity of calls handled in call center operations. For the benchmarking survey, BenchmarkPortal monitored and measured Alliance Data's performance against these KPIs and its large call center database to determine each center's level of efficiency and effectiveness. Alliance Data continues to score higher than the industry average in several KPIs including: first call resolution, time calls are spent in queue and the speed at which calls are answered.

"As one of the best in the industry, Alliance Data consistently demonstrates leadership in call center operational quality and clearly strives to exemplify best practices in all aspects of call center management," said Bruce Belfiore, chief executive officer of BenchmarkPortal. "These achievements of distinction confirm Alliance Data's continuous efforts undertaken to achieve this level of sustainable service excellence."