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EDS gets Census Bureau contract

The services and consulting firm snags a two-year, $100 million contract to help the agency handle the huge volume of telephone traffic expected in 2000.

Kim Girard
Kim Girard has written about business and technology for more than a decade, as an editor at CNET News.com, senior writer at Business 2.0 magazine and online writer at Red Herring. As a freelancer, she's written for publications including Fast Company, CIO and Berkeley's Haas School of Business. She also assisted Business Week's Peter Burrows with his 2003 book Backfire, which covered the travails of controversial Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. An avid cook, she's blogged about the joy of cheap wine and thinks about food most days in ways some find obsessive.
Kim Girard
The Census Bureau will be counting on EDS for its Year 2000 report.

The services and consulting giant today snagged a two-year, $100 million contract to help the data-collecting agency handle the huge volume of telephone traffic expected in 2000. Under the contract, the second awarded to EDS by the Census Bureau, the company will build a telephone network to handle inquiries in six languages.

As prime vendor, EDS and its partners will build and operate 30 toll-free call centers nationwide used to collect census information. The centers will employ 6,000 agents.

During a five-month period in 2000, EDS expects to handle at least 11 million calls and make another 4.5 million calls to correct and gather missing information from census forms.

The EDS system will operate in English, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Tagalog, and Korean.

The company's team includes Centrobe, a division of EDS; AFFINA; APAC TeleServices; Call Interactive; Geotel; Precision Response; TeleTech Holdings; and West TeleServices.