Joel Julien

Some 200 Di­re­cOne work­ers are now said to be fac­ing the bread­line fol­low­ing a de­ci­sion by the ma­jor­i­ty State-owned Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Ser­vices of Trinidad and To­ba­go (TSTT) to end its con­tract with the com­pa­ny for the sup­ply of call cen­tre ser­vices.

The sit­u­a­tion, how­ev­er, is not ex­pect­ed to ad­verse­ly im­pact TSTT’s cus­tomers sig­nif­i­cant­ly, as a new ser­vice provider is al­ready be­ing con­tract­ed.

Guardian Me­dia has been told that the new call cen­tre provider will be Call Serv Ltd.

Di­re­cOne’s con­tract of­fi­cial­ly end­ed yes­ter­day, the last day of TSTT’s fi­nan­cial year.

As a re­sult, the hot­line 824-TSTT is ex­pect­ed to be un­avail­able to cus­tomers from mid­night to around 8 am to­day.

Di­re­cOne han­dled all of TSTT’s call cen­tre ser­vices, in­clud­ing its Help Desk for mo­bile, land­line and in­ter­net ser­vices.

Sev­er­al of Di­re­cOne’s cus­tomer sales and ser­vice spe­cial­ists have al­ready re­ceived ter­mi­na­tion let­ters fol­low­ing the end of the con­tract with TSTT.

A re­lease from TSTT last night con­firmed that it had en­list­ed the ser­vices of new providers to sup­port its con­tact cen­tre op­er­a­tions.

“Noth­ing changes, TSTT’s con­tact cen­tre will be ful­ly re­sourced and cus­tomers will ex­pe­ri­ence no dif­fer­ence in op­er­a­tions. 824-TSTT is an im­por­tant cus­tomer touch­point that the com­pa­ny in­tends to main­tain,” TSTT stat­ed.

“TSTT gives its as­sur­ance that cus­tomers will still be able to call 824-TSTT for in­for­ma­tion on prod­ucts and ser­vices, tech­ni­cal sup­port, bill re­lat­ed queries and the full range of ser­vices pre­vi­ous­ly pro­vid­ed.”

TSTT is joint­ly owned by Na­tion­al En­ter­pris­es Ltd, which in turn is ma­jor­i­ty-owned by the Gov­ern­ment and Ca­ble & Wire­less (West In­dies) Ltd (C&W). NEL owns 51 per cent of TSTT’s is­sued share cap­i­tal, while C&W holds 49 per cent.

TSTT is the coun­try’s largest provider of com­mu­ni­ca­tions so­lu­tions to the res­i­den­tial and com­mer­cial mar­kets.