INDUSTRY
Agero is Growing & Investing Millions By Tony Centonze Agero, Inc. a call center which offers roadside assistance, as well as safety and security services, recently announced a $2 million expansion of its Clarksville facility. An investment that will create as many as 900 new jobs over the next five years. “We are based out of Medford, Massachesetts,” said Will Fugette, Senior Director of Operations. “We currently have three contact center locations, two in Tennessee, and one in Tucson, AZ. We have about 800 employees in Clarksville, making it the largest of our centers. Over the next five years we are investing about $2 million for expansion at this location." “When we came here in 2012, we only took part of that building in the business park. Since then, another tenant vacated, and we took over their lease, expanding our existing operations and creating another couple of hundred seats.” Agero, Inc. is a business-to-business provider for driver assistance services. Its clients are primarily auto manufacturers and car insurance companies. To those clients, Agero, Inc. provides roadside assistance, accident management, connected vehicle services, and much more. “Clarksville is a great example of all the lines of business within our company,” Fugette said. “Everything we do, is done at some scale, in Clarksville. From consumer affairs to basic roadside assistance to more technical tier-2 type work. All of it happens here." “We are the largest B2B provider in this 12 • CLARKSVILLE BUSINESS JOURNAL
space, in the country. We do roughly 12 million requests for roadside assistance annually, and protect more than 115 million vehicles on the road today.” Fugette actually moved here to open the site. “We did a nationwide search, looking at the labor markets and the talent pool, and we landed in Clarksville,” Fugette said. “We came to the job fairs first to see what the talent was like, and what type of people were here. We were instantly impressed with the candidate flow that we saw, and the diversity of the community, with APSU and Fort Campbell. We felt that this was the right place to be. When we opened this center. It wasn’t our largest, but the success we had with recruiting and hiring has allowed us to continue to increase the number of jobs, and expand the lines of business we do here.” Agero, Inc. currently offers a variety of jobs from entry-level to mid-level, and even higher-end technical positions. Fugette says Clarksville has been a great fit for all the lines of work they do, and continues to provide a strong pipeline, bringing in lots of talented people. “On a basic entry-level job, our employees are assisting a caller who needs a tow, or a jump-start, or maybe they locked their keys in the car. The associate identifies their coverage, from there, they dispatch that job out to our network of service providers across the country, and the service writer executes the call." “Once you have that event, there can be subsequent additional needs. Next, there is accident-scene management, that’s a
higher-level job, those associate’s are talking with the customer in real-time, getting the vehicle off the road, getting it to a repair facility, and seeing that job all the way through, until everything’s done, and the vehicle is returned to the customer.” Fugette says initial training for entry level jobs takes about four weeks, which includes two weeks in the classroom and a week of on-the-job call-taking. Then there is a nesting period that takes them through their first 90 days of employment. At which time there are additional support resources available. Coaches and supervisors are helping throughout that initial period. From there, once they’ve mastered that entrylevel position, additional cross-training is offered. “An employee may learn to dispatch very well for one of our clients, then, as they get more experienced and proficient we can add additional lines of work to them,” Fugette said. “From there, they can promote into lots of additional positions. We have consumer affairs jobs where they handle everything for the vehicle, from a customer service perspective. That can range from answering questions about how to program a phone into a vehicle’s radio system, to helping a customer who’s having a problem with the vehicle’s upholstery." “From accident management, associates can move into an ultra-premium program, where they only support owners of ultra-premium vehicles. From there, they can promote into what we call tier-2." “Clarksville is the home of our command center, a higher level of the tier-2 groups. A command center associate is completely empowered to do whatever they need to do to take care of their customers, be it, get them an Uber or Lyft to get them off the road, or send them a cup of coffee, basically, anything they need to do to make sure that event
