40,000+ Katrina Family Members Reconnected

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 12, 2005

Columbus, Ohio:  The launch of the toll-free resource for hurricane survivors to connect with family and friends was announced on Friday, September 2, 2005.  By 7pm Central Time (New Orleans’ time zone) that day, the first call had been answered.  More than 380,000 phone calls have been placed to the national Family Link service, and over 40,000 family members and friends have been reunited since then.

Twenty First Century Communications was able to quickly man phones by combining its emergency communication technology with live agents from LiveOps, Inc. the country’s largest domestic outsourced call center, making exclusive use of home based agents. The phone calls were handled by a network of 6,000 LiveOps home based agents.

President Bush announced the 1-877-LOVED-1S number in his speech to the nation from New Orleans on September 15, 2005.

The 1-877-LOVED-1S phone lines are monitored 24/7 by Twenty First Century Communications, a leader in providing urgent high volume call handling services to utilities, government agencies, public safety entities and businesses using the industry’s largest and most reliable communications network.

According to James Lehr Kennedy, founder & CEO of Twenty First Century Communications, “While we have helped to provide reliable communications solutions to hundreds of organizations every day to ensure their continuity of operations, we have never done more important work than this – reconnecting lives. But we know there is more work to be done because calls continue to come in. So we know people are still missing.”

Added Bill Trenchard, CEO of LiveOps, the largest domestic outsourced call center, “When we received the call on September 2nd from Twenty First Century to be part of its team, we were the first contact center to react with almost 400 telephone agents ready in matter of hours. We are proud to be part of a team that has helped to reconnect over 10,000 people.  But, the calls do keep coming and there are more people to help. We will continue to support hurricane Katrina survivors as long as necessary.”

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