To help meet the demand of its growing contact center business, Xtend, Inc., the Grand Rapids, Michigan-based multi-owned cooperative CUSO, announced it will expand its remote staff to include agents located at Fairhope, Alabama-based CU*SOUTH. Both CUSOs are members of the cuasterisk.com network.

According to Xtend President Scott Collins the two CUSOs started dialogue about the project several months ago. “One of the fundamental philosophies we have at Xtend is to think ‘CUSO first’ when we are looking for collaborative opportunities,” Collins noted. “In this case we had a definite need to expand our call center agent team, and a CUSO partner within our network with available resources that could be leveraged. And the fact that they were already familiar with the core data processing system our collective customer-owners utilize meant they could be cross-trained and deployed quickly. It really became a question of when we could add them to our overall agent pool, not how or why.”

Collins also noted that Xtend is working closely with their west coast cuasterisk.com partner—Liberty Lake, Washington-based CU*Northwest—to increase the number of remote agents they have deployed at CU*NorthWest’s headquarters as well.