Canadian Tire Financial Services Named Call Centre of the Year for 2013

Third consecutive year Financial Services has been named Call Centre of the Year by Service Quality Measurement Group

TORONTO, April 17, 2014 /CNW/ - Canadian Tire Financial Services Limited (CTFS) is pleased to announce that its customer service contact centres in Welland and St. Catharines, Ontario have been named Call Centre of the Year for 2013, by Service Quality Measurement Group (SQM). Since 2002, SQM – a North American call centre industry research firm – has presented CTFS with more than 60 awards and repeatedly recognized the Company as a leading contact centre.

"It's a great honour to be recognized as call centre of the year," said Mary Turner, Chief Operating Officer, CTFS and President, Canadian Tire Bank. "Our team takes pride in delivering excellent customer service to our customers and this award further reinforces our staff's commitment to and heightened pride in the Canadian Tire brand."

In addition to this award, CTFS's contact centres earned top honours in the following categories: Best Performing Small to Mid-Size Call Centre, Highest Customer Satisfaction for Credit Card Industry, Highest Employee Satisfaction for the Call Centre Industry, Highest Employee Satisfaction Financial Industry and World Class Employee Satisfaction. The CTFS call centre that earned SQM's top prize is comprised of 550 employees who respond to more than 300,000 inbound calls, emails and Internet inquiries per month. They provide customer service for the family of Canadian Tire branded credit cards.

"On behalf of SQM, I would like to congratulate CTFS, their customer service representatives and supervisors for their outstanding achievement this year," said President and Founder of SQM Group, Mike Desmarais. "Achieving this level of call centre excellence takes a united effort and we are thrilled to acknowledge such a strong team."

SQM benchmarks more than 450 leading call centres annually and has been conducting first call resolution, customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction call centre benchmarking studies since 1996. Organizations that have participated in SQM's benchmarking study qualify for SQM's call centre service awards program. For the 2013 award year, SQM conducted call centre benchmarking studies between January 1, 2013 and December 31, 2013. SQM presented and recognized call centre service excellence award winners at their 15th annual conference, which was held in Washington D.C., on April 15th and 16th, 2014. Overall, 41 different awards were issued to the top performing organizations for achieving world class performance.

For the full list of 2013 winners, visit http://www.sqmgroup.com/2013-call-center-award-winners

About Canadian Tire Financial Services
Located in Welland, Oakville and St. Catharines, Ontario, Canadian Tire Financial Services Limited ("CTFSL") is a wholly owned subsidiary of Canadian Tire Corporation, Limited. CTFSL is primarily engaged in marketing and promoting Canadian Tire branded financial products and services. CTFSL is the parent company of Canadian Tire Bank. Canadian Tire Bank issues the Canadian Tire Options®  MasterCard®, among other credit cards, with currently over 4 million accounts. The Options MasterCard is accepted at over 24 million locations worldwide, and enables cardholders to participate electronically in Canada's oldest and most recognized loyalty program - Canadian Tire 'Money'. In addition, Canadian Tire Bank offers high interest savings accounts, tax-free savings accounts and GICs and CTFSL manages Canadian Tire Home Services®.

About Service Quality Measurement Group
Since 1996, Service Quality Measurement (SQM) Group has been a leading North American research firm for benchmarking and tracking voice of the customer (VoC), first call resolution (FCR) and customer satisfaction (Csat) call center performance. SQM's consulting services assist call centers with best practices for improving FCR. In addition, we award call centers that have demonstrated FCR excellence. Over 70% of our call centres tracking clients see improvements in their FCR and operating costs year- over-year. SQM also benchmarks and tracks all the major contact channels (i.e., website, call center, IVR, email and site). Our site contact channels include branch, retail store, dispatching and service work. SQM conducts over 1 million surveys (over 450,000 live surveys and over 550,000 IVR surveys) with customers who have used a call center, email, website, IVR or site contact channel service

For more information, please visit http://www.sqmgroup.com/.

SOURCE: CANADIAN TIRE CORPORATION, LIMITED

Teresa Cugliari, Canadian Tire Corporation, T: 416.322.2975, [email protected]