April O’Mara, Customer Support Representative, will celebrate her 16th anniversary with the company in March. She and other long-term employees were recently honored at a lunch where Paul Lombardo, Executive Vice-President of our company, lauded the group for making the company the kind of place where other people wanted to work. April O’Mara clearly fills that bill with her pleasant personality, sincerity, and willingness to go the extra mile for her customers and co-workers.

April started out as a forms analyst, but spent most of her career as a customer service representative. For 13 years, she provided customer service to schools, and now she is the primary customer support representative to collection agencies. In this role, she answers questions about loans and helps them sign up for services like DataLink and DocumentDirect. She makes table changes that control schools’ options for collection and works closely with customer service to make adjustments to collection payments.

She says of her work with collection agencies, "I am there for them to provide whatever they want. If they have DataLink and have questions, I look at the loan and explain what appears on the screen. If they are new to DocumentDirect, I will help them get signed on for the first time." April says she typically gets 30 to 35 phone calls a day. Some questions take just a few minutes to answer, but others, like those concerning DocumentDirect log-ons, may take longer. She actually has assignments for over 2,000 collection agencies that schools work with.

Her favorite part of the job is helping people. She wants to give the best customer support she can. "I don’t want to end a phone call with the sense that the collection agency did not get their question answered. If I leave them with that feeling, I don’t think I did a good job. I do everything I can to avoid that situation."

Although April is the primary collection agency contact, she stresses that two excellent back-ups are on-board if she is not available. Both Linda Glenn and Chris Martin are highly experienced customer support representatives, who can respond to collection agencies, if necessary.

When asked about her proudest accomplishment, April cites her two sons. Gingerbread men that they decorated in kindergarten, as well as numerous photos of her boys, line her cubicle walls. Cody, age 8, recently won his first karate tournament, and Tyler, age 11, was voted Student of theYear at his elementary school. She and her husband, Mark, volunteer at their sons’ school as much as they can. Family activities dominate her personal life, and to add to the mix, she and her husband are currently building a home.

April is a Winston-Salem native and graduated from R.J. Reynolds High School. She has an associate’s degree from Forsyth Technical Communty College