41 programmes moved to a cloud platform, 2024–2025
Measured availability, 2025
99.96%
Includes a 52-minute routing failure
A considered point of view.
An outsourcer sells its clients a promise about other people's information. Callers never chose us; they chose a utility, an insurer or a software company, and reached our agents because that company hired us. I judge our systems by whether such a caller would recognise the arrangement if it were explained to them, not only by whether a contract permits it.
Selected leadership work / 01
Separating every client's desktops and recordings at the cost of blended staffing
In 2021 a security review by Pellerath Health Software, a prospective client seeking second-line support for its clinic software, found two weaknesses at our Bathurst centre.
I run the systems of a shared contact-centre business so that each client's data, calls and consent decisions stay separate even when agents, sites and platforms are shared.
I am chief information officer of Tidelorne Contact Services, a Moncton company listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange that answers calls, chats and emails and provides second-line IT support for 29 client organisations. We run six centres, in Moncton and Bathurst, Trois-Rivières and Sherbrooke, and Winnipeg and Brandon, plus about 700 agents working from home. Revenue in 2025 was C$318 million and we employ about 5,400 people. My 164 colleagues run the systems the company itself depends on: telephony, workforce management, client integrations, agent desktops and information security.
Our clients include utilities, property and casualty insurers, software companies and health-technology vendors. They hire us for trained people, but they also hand us their customers' personal information, their call recordings and, increasingly, their decisions about automation. Most of my work is keeping those commitments apart while agents, buildings and platforms are shared. A client's security reviewer wants to know where a recording sits and who can open it. An agent wants a schedule that matches the day actually worked. Our finance team wants the platform to cost less every year.
I began on a computer help desk in Moncton in 1996, moved into business telephony and then ran contact-centre systems for an insurer in Halifax before joining Tidelorne in 2010. That route left me wary of any change described only from the vendor's side. Each decision on this site cost something visible: agent flexibility, a vendor incentive and two prospective contracts. I set out those costs plainly because our audit and risk committee asked to see them that way.
Every programme on its own environment
Between 2021 and 2023 we moved all 36 programmes then running onto separate desktop pools, recording stores and encryption keys. Blended staffing ended for most clients, and occupancy at the affected centres fell three points before rebuilt forecasting recovered two.
4,300 seats moved one programme at a time
Our telephony migration ran for fifteen months rather than three weekends. Dual running cost C$2.3 million and we gave up a C$900,000 vendor incentive. Annual telephony cost is now C$3.1 million lower.
Agent-assist only where clients instructed it
Eleven programmes use real-time transcription and suggested answers, processed in Canada with a caller notice. We declined two prospective contracts worth C$4.2 million a year that wanted transcripts used for model training.
Current focus
I am preparing our next ISO/IEC 27001 surveillance audit while reviewing how long we keep recordings and transcripts for each client, because several retention schedules were written before transcription existed.
Conversations I welcome
I would welcome a first non-executive role on an audit, risk or technology committee of a Canadian organisation that holds customer information at scale, with about eighteen days a year available, subject to our board's consent and a check of client relationships.
The leadership record
Trusted with consequential decisions.
Formation
Bachelor of science in computer scienceMirlochan University · 1996
When Ethan brings me a recommendation, it arrives with the objection already written into it, usually in the words of the colleague who raised it. That made the telephony decision harder to approve and much easier to defend to clients afterwards.
Lucienne ThibodraisChief executive officer, Tidelorne Contact ServicesThe full record ↗
Contact
I would welcome a first non-executive role on an audit, risk or technology committee of a Canadian organisation that holds customer information at scale, with about eighteen days a year available, subject to our board's consent and a check of client relationships.
