The advertising is so prevalent and the logo so recognizable?the little orange figure shaped like a child’s jack?it’s hard to believe that Cingular Wireless didn’t exist until two years ago.

A massive media campaign is one of the benefits when you’re the offspring of telco giants like SBC Communications and BellSouth, which knit their cellular operations together in 2000 to launch Atlanta-based Cingular. However, a single name does not a single company make. A customer moving from Sacramento to Wherever might find her interactions with customer service completely different?different agents following different scripts, an unfamiliar bill and so on. Cingular’s set of 60 call centers were cobbled together by years of mergers and acquisitions.

That’s par for the course in the wireless business, which started in the ’80s under heavy regulation, with each market served by only two local carriers. According to Cingular COO Mark Feidler, when the spectrum licensing rules changed in the ’90s, and customers started moving across markets with increasing frequency, the local providers were compelled to become regional, and then national. An M&A frenzy ensued. But the resulting morass of customer support facilities is no way to run a business when customer service is one of your main points of competition. "This is an industry with no intrinsic customer loyalty," says Carl Pitasi, a senior consultant with Compass America, a consultancy in Oak Brook, Ill. "A big part of your [profit and loss statement] depends on how long customers stay with you, and the quality of call center support plays very strongly into that."

Launching a national brand?that was the easy part. Behind the scenes, Cingular faced the task of rationalizing 60 call centers and 1,400 IT systems, including 11 major customer billing systems. Today?two years later?Cingular runs 20 brand-new multifunction call center facilities ranging in size from 600 to 1,200 agents. The 11 billing systems have been reduced to seven and will be down to two by the end of the year. The work isn’t finished yet, but already the efforts are beginning to pay off. Cingular’s centers handled 1 million more calls in 2001 than they did the previous year (as separate entities). Average call duration (a classic call center efficiency metric, since longer calls require more staff) was 30 percent lower in December 2001 than in December 2000. Internal quality measurements are also up, though Cingular won’t quantify the rise. Here’s a look at the challenges and lessons from the call center consolidation and the making of a single Cingular.