"Smilin' and dialin'" attitude nets profits - Kathleen Kelly, CEO of TeleDirect International - Company Operations

Communications News, Feb, 1999 by Sam Diamond

Kathleen Kelly, CEO of TeleDirect International, Proves Old-Fashioned Integrity Still Counts.

In today's cut-throat world it often seems that the one thing not required for success is personal integrity. Grit, savvy, a competitive nature, perseverance, innovation--yes. But personal integrity? Not really.

Fortunately, however, there are exceptions. A case in point: TeleDirect International, Inc., a leading provider of call center solutions for the teleservices industry. At TeleDirect, integrity has been the key focal point for the company's CEO--and the underlying reason for its self-made success.

Ask TeleDirect's chairman of the board Ted Johnson (president of JTEC Associates, a flow-meter manufacturer in Cedar Rapids, Iowa) why he selected Kathleen Kelly to be CEO back in 1987, and personal integrity leads the list of reasons. "I'd known Kathleen for several years before offering her the position of CEO of TeleDirect," he says, "and I made the offer because I was very impressed by her clear business acumen, her drive to succeed, her positive thinking, her personality, her goal-setting skills, and most of all, her integrity."

Ask customers why they purchase a TeleDirect solution over the competition--and, again, Kelly's personal integrity is a reason. "When we looked at other predictive-dialer vendors we couldn't even meet a high-level executive, let alone the CEO," says Wendell Flemister, president, Apex Marketing, Inc., Little Rock, Ark., a 10-year provider of teleservices to the time-share industry that uses TeleDirect systems in all five of its geographically distributed call centers. "But with TeleDirect things were different. We met Kathleen Kelly personally and were impressed by her integrity and her dedication to do whatever it takes to make things work for her customers. And, of course, we were also impressed by the company's technology."

While the woman behind the company is certainly at the root of TeleDirect's success, a key part of her accomplishment is the way she has kept the firm ahead of the technology development curve in her industry. The first predictive-dialing company to come out with a network-based product, TeleDirect was also the first to offer a product based on a standard network infrastructure and the first to offer a campaign-based application development tool.

So, where does she see the industry going now? The best indicator is the company's recent commitment to a new direction in teleservices--automated campaign development and management. Whether the focus of a campaign is to generate sales, improve collections, identify charitable donors, or complete surveys, development used to be a time-intensive chore that actually restricted the creativity of those campaigns.

"With a tool that expedites campaign creation, a wide variety of campaign approaches can be tried to evaluate the success of changing parameters," Kelly says. "In other words, with a campaign development tool, campaigns are limited by the creativity of the developer--not the difficulty of the task."

Perceiving campaign development to be the next major issue in teleservices technology, TeleDirect has again scored a first with the recent announcement of a wizard-based campaign development tool. And, as if this were not enough of an innovation, the company brought out an entirely new platform to support the tool.

Called LIBERATION 6000, this platform is the physical manifestation of another vision Kelly has for the industry--elimination of proprietary and closed call center systems. Shedding this outdated model, TeleDirect's new product is entirely standards-based. Running on a Windows NT platform, the "6000" relies on industry-standard Dialogic boards, leverages Microsoft SQL Server Relational Database and Microsoft Access, and is the first dialing platform in the teleservices industry to support H.100 and S. 100 standards.

"LIBERATION 6000, with its Campaign Builder tool, represents a significant advance in the teleservices industry," Kelly says, "because, until now, the predictive-dialing industry was mired in a mind-set that focused solely on helping call center agents make as many calls as possible in any given time frame. But we now know that this time-honored paradigm is only one element of a successful strategy and that the success of the campaigns that agents work on is of equal--if not greater--importance. That's why we are now refocusing our efforts on developing tools and platforms that empower companies to meet their larger goals."

In fact, Kelly is now basing all business decisions for TeleDirect on the belief that, in the teleservices world, success needs to be measured by bottom-line results--not just agent productivity.

The company first put its money where its proverbial mouth is in this regard with the release of Application Builder last year, an easy-to-use graphical tool that facilitates rapid development and deployment of scripts and applications that can directly access databases and applications from other systems in the enterprise network. With this tool, which requires no prior programming experience to learn, end users can easily and quickly create, customize, and refine their own scripts and applications with no vendor involvement. In so doing, companies are freed to cost-effectively ensure that their agents always have the information they need to leverage every call into an opportunity.