Disabled Staffers Check Customer Service

- from http://www.courierpostonline.com/news/business/b070305a.htm:

It was late 1999 when Mike Schrider of Shamong thought up a way to combine his experience as an executive for a call-center company with the needs he saw as a volunteer for a state disability facility.

A company that put these physically disabled people to work and filled a growing need in the ever-expanding customer service industry would also satisfy his recurring yearning to start a new business.

"Before, the call centers were monitoring their own calls and it was sort of like the fox watching the hen house," Schrider said. "So this was like putting two and two together. Rather than sending these kinds of jobs to Canada and India, we can give these other folks a job right here in the U.S."

By early 2000, Schrider had scrounged together hundreds of thousands of dollars and founded the company J.Lodge - named after a paralyzed patient he'd encountered in the hospital. He got an office in Hammonton and set up shop with just him and his wife.

J.Lodge's initial mission was twofold: Provide customer service for corporations and also check the quality of that service internally. The fuel to run the business would be a largely untapped labor pool, the disabled. Their business, which centered on outsourcing basic call-center services, would span industries and countries.... Read the full story