Contact Lens

Contact Lens
A Closer Look at USP’s Contact Centre Operations
November 2022

Brr! It’s that time of the year again when "fall” is the official season, but as most Canadians know, that just means "winter, but with a couple more 2°C days”. Operations have successfully wound down, and now that things aren’t quite frozen, but are mucky and cold and generally unpleasant, Excavators have thrown in the proverbial towel for the year and are getting ready to hunker down with the rest of us.

Of course, here at USP, the pre-winter season is when things start getting interesting again! As I’ve regaled those who read this column in the past, we are once again reviewing policies (fun!), updating documentation (thrilling!) and drafting new procedures (electrifying!). Nothing on the scale of say, the Performance Management policy overhaul that occurred last year, but your usual mish-mash of necessary Excel-sheeting and Word-documenting that any ISO-compliant business must take care of in modern times.

We of course still need to step back, take a deep breath, and ask the difficult questions when reflecting on the previous season.

Where did we succeed in the last season?

Where did we fail?

What can we do better? Or, more importantly, how can we serve the safety of our custodial provinces better?

One of the best things we did in 2022 was overhaul our online Web Training process. Typically in the past, we would run 20-30 online Webinars for excavators each season (which expectedly would have diminishing participants as the season passed through the summer). In 2022, we released a short series of Gold Standard YouTube videos demonstrating our website’s basic and advanced level processes. I haven’t seen the numbers yet, but we have strong hopes that this will culminate in a safer season with less utility strikes per capita! We’ve already seen an increase in web usage in 2022 over 2021, so that’s mission #1. As readers here know, the more web users we have, the less damages sustained per season!

The sun sets on the 2022 season, and 2023 looms large with great promise.

Joe Rosenberg