Call Center Services Featured Article
Maine's The Place Again New TD Contact Center
June 15, 2009
By Brendan B. Read
Senior Contributing Editor
The state of Maine has long sought contact centers to alleviate high unemployment in older mill and resource communities. Thanks to the state’s value proposition of an affordable, educated, and hard working labor force and supportive communities, it has been successful.
That includes attracting repeat business from TD Bank, formerly TD Banknorth, which will be opening its third facility in the Lewiston-Auburn area in 2010. The new center, which will have 500 seats, will be located in a vacant space inside the Auburn Mall and will eventually employ up to 500 mostly full-time workers when running at full capacity.
The 60,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art site will be LEED (Leadership in Energy and Efficient Design) certified and include several environmentally-friendly features. It will have state-of-the-art lighting and climate controls, use water-efficient irrigation and recycled wood, and offer employees bicycle storage.
TD has a 10-year lease on the property, and the $16 million renovation will begin later this year. The project will provide a significant boost to the local construction industry. The facility is expected to be ready for occupancy by mid-2010 with approximately 200 employees to start, with the remaining positions projected to be filled through 2011. The new center will also help the mall’s other tenants by providing them with an onsite customer base.
The new contact center agents will be part of the team that provides customers with live service 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and will serve TD Bank’s entire Maine-to-Florida footprint. The new facility will be part of TD Bank, ‘America's Most Convenient Bank’, the new name and brand of TD Banknorth beginning fall 2009.
TD has a long-standing partnership with Lewiston-Auburn that goes back more than a decade. Approximately 1,000 bank employees are currently located in Lewiston-Auburn area facilities, including Bates Mill and the Sparetime Office Park. TD Bank first opened in the region in 1997 with an operations center at the historic Bates Mill complex, which it has expanded twice. In 2006 it expanded its Direct Banking Call Center in Lewiston, adding 50 new jobs and investing almost $1 million in improvements to the facility.
The new contact center will be busy thanks to service and acquisitions. TD Bank has a strong customer service culture, reports customers of its Canadian parent. Following TD Bank Financial Group’s acquisition of Commerce Bancorp Inc. on March 31, 2008, TD Banknorth and Commerce Bank merged on May 31, 2008, to become TD Bank, America's Most Convenient Bank. Today, TD Banknorth and TD Bank form one of the 15 largest commercial banks in the United States with $126 billion in assets, and provide customers with a full range of financial products and services at more than 1,000 convenient locations from Maine to Florida. TD Bank, N.A., is headquartered in Cherry Hill, N.J., and Portland, Maine.
“We are excited to strengthen our partnership with the local community and create jobs to accommodate our growth,” says Bharat Masrani, President and CEO of TD Bank. “Maine is a great place to do business for our bank, and this is a major investment in the future of Lewiston-Auburn, Maine, and TD Bank. Lewiston-Auburn is a critical employment base for TD. This investment will help ensure we continue to deliver award-winning customer service and live the promise of being America's Most Convenient Bank as we acquire new customers and open more than 30 new stores every year.”
Brendan B. Read is TMCnet’s Senior Contributing Editor. To read more of Brendan’s articles, please visit his columnist page.Edited by Jessica Kostek
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