Frontline’s Blankenship Wins SBA Award for “Revolutionizing the Industry”

Jill Blankenship

from the Small Business Administration Seattle Reporter

Jill Blankenship will tell anyone who listens that the days of needing a giant office space to house a call center are long gone. Also heading the way of the dinosaurs are proprietary employees who only handle technical support over-the-phone for one company.

Blankenship’s company Frontline Call Center is in a relatively small building (compared to massive call center office spaces) and her employees provide customer service support for a number of clients. What makes her very different from the competition, though, is where her business is located – in Eastsound, Wash., on Orcas Island, part of the San Juan Islands.

The remote setting means that she can only have a handful of employees physically work at the main business building, so she hired other call center agents across the country to be able to provide 24-hour assistance to the company’s clients. Blankenship’s innovation, dedication to technology, savvy business planning and help from the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) has established Frontline Call Center as a leader in the call center industry and helped earned her the SBA 2013 Washington state Small Business Person of the Year recipient.

Frontline Call Center is a rural outsourcing call center that provides a full array of telecommunications solutions and has grown to become a multimillion-dollar company employing more than 60 people across 12 states. Started in 2005, Blankenship created the company as a response to meet Orcas Island’s need for steady year round employment in a rural area with severe location challenges. Last year, she opened another call center location in Friday Harbor, Wash., part of San Juan Island.

(To read the full article, go to sba.gov/success-stories/)