DirectTV celebrates opening of new customer care center

HUNTINGTON -- Former employees of PRC's Huntington call center officially became employees of DirecTV on Monday, when DirecTV hosted a ribbon-cutting event at its newest customer care center.

The call center is located at 2205 5th Street Road. DirecTV had been the sole client for PRC's Huntington office, and 550 employees are staying.

DirecTV purchased the center from PRC this month for about $1.5 million, said Mike Palkovic, executive vice president of operations for DirecTV.

PRC is a Florida-based company that provides outsourced customer service and had owned the call center in Huntington early in 2007. It filed for bankruptcy earlier this year, and a spokeswoman said the Huntington closure was a measure taken as it realigned its finances and operations.

For the past year and half, PRC's Huntington employees have been helping DirecTV's customers with service issues, said Palkovic, who came to Huntington for the Monday's event.

Huntington call center representatives provide support for more than 17 million customers nationwide, handling a wide range of call types involving products and programming, new and existing customer activation, upgrades, sports programming, pay-per-view event ordering and related transactions.

"They took roughly 7 million calls that year. They're very important to us," Palkovic said.

About 470 of the employees at the call center are agents, and 80 are support staff, such as supervisors, as well as information technology and human resources staff.

In the future, "There's always the possibility of growth," Palkovic said. "There's the ability to expand the facility a little bit (and expand the number of employees)."

The site director is Cindy Alexander, who relocated to Huntington from Colorado Springs, Colo. "We were very lucky," Palkovic said. "She's a very experienced director in the business."

This is DirecTV's sixth owned-and-operated call center, and owning the center as opposed to contracting those services should contribute to better customer satisfaction, he said. Employees can now be 100 percent focused on DirecTV's needs.

DirecTV has ranked No. 1 in customer service by two national surveys of the cable and dish network industry -- the American Customer Service Satisfaction Index, and a J.D. Power and Associates survey.

"We have a huge commitment to customer satisfaction and the entire service experience with customers," Palkovic said. "We take a lot of pride in being No. 1 in our industry."