October 6, 2003
NEWS RELEASE

Accu-Link Uses Alliance/Open Book Approach
New Approach For Call Centres Managed By Third Parties

Accu-Link Uses Alliance/Open Book Approach, Sharing Everything With Board Members

Toronto ( Ontario ) Using Teldig technology, Accu-Link successfully provides service for Ontario One Call with it's 50 seat centre generating 13,200 tickets daily with 3200 telephone requests per day. Accu-Link provides damage prevention call centre and ticket screening services. Beyond state-of-the-art telephony, computer hardware and screening services, Accu-Links difference is its approach with customers.

Because request or ticket based pricing for "vendor based" centres don't always play in the favour of the members, Accu-Link has developed a simple and easy way to offer its services. Called the "alliance/open book" approach. Accu-Link will detail and share all costs related to operating the centre with The Board. Then, programs are designed to set a mechanism on how to share the savings going forward. No surprises, nothing hidden. This is actually in place with the board of Ontario One Call.

Andy Antoniou, president of Ontario One Call has this to say. “Accu-Links alliance/open book approach has been a very beneficial change within the One Call industry. Our experience has been very positive in terms of performance levels and continuous improvement. Accu-Link’s motivated environment and ability to focus on customer satisfaction has been a refreshing change from our past experiences. The alliance approach motivates both sides to drive out costs and share in the savings. We will be moving forward with the alliance/open book methodology in other areas of our non Call Centre business.
Our alliance approach makes available a wide range of expertise which has been freely shared amongst the group and enables us to drastically shorten the learning curve that comes with any new business says Mark Brabant, President of Accu-Link. This approach gets you the best of both worlds. It allows the call centre experts to manage your centre but at the same time the customer gets to share in the savings that are found through the efficiencies that Accu-Link brings with it to each project.”

Partnering with Accu-Link enables us to access a market segment that we could not reach before mentioned Martin Johnson, Teldig's Vice President of Sales and Marketing. "Our recent implementations and sales have proven our capacity to serve large volume centres and Accu-Links alliance/open book approach is probably the preferred way to provide the best working relationship with the members. Accu-Link’s management team brings with it years of call centre and Teldig experience along with years of experience within the underground utilities market. Our management has backgrounds in utility contracting, locating and of course call centre operations. Our successes to date have come from our ability to work with our customer, for our customer, to increase call centre efficiencies and to decrease operational costs. This has been accomplished through a unique alliance/open book approach. Briefly, what this means is, we share all of our information (costs, capital purchases, labour etc.), show our previously agreed upon profit levels and commence from there to decrease those costs. When the savings are realized we design a program as to how those savings are shared with the customer, driving down the overall costs to operate the One Call facility. Founded in 1994, Teldig Systems is a premier provider of damage prevention solutions for buried infrastructure. Teldig Systems develops, markets and supports state of the art damage prevention software tools to manage underground plant locating requests for One Call Centres, utilities and contract locators. The Teldig Series covers all aspects of the buried utility locate request lifecycle with unique technology that optimizes time and money of the resources involved, from the One Call centre to the locator in his truck.