The call-center outsourcing industry changed on a September day in 2004, when IT executive Pierre Grimard and his colleagues realized that their plan would work.

Leading a project for Nordia Inc. of Montreal, one of Canada's largest customer contact-center companies, Grimard and his team were trying to create an entirely new way to route and manage long distance calls. They had to meet an immovable deadline under amazingly difficult conditions.

Nordia had a contract with the State of California to provide relay services, whereby specially trained communication assistants transcribe and relay telephone conversations back and forth between people who are deaf, hard of hearing, or speech-disabled and those they wish to communicate with by telephone.

This was no ordinary contract. It specified more than 500 functions to be carried out. The call center needed to handle new technologies, including Internet-protocol and wireless technologies, as well as specialized technologies used for hearing-impaired and speech-disabled callers -- and in English, Spanish and eventually French.

The service level demanded by the contract was unprecedented: an average call-answering time of 3.3 seconds, compared with 20 seconds for the industry as a whole.

"The service level for this contract is one of the fastest and toughest to meet in the industry," says Grimard, Nordia's vice-president of information technology, who has been managing complex telecommunication projects for 20 years. "It's not even a ring tone."

Most challenging of all, California had chosen three call-center service providers, which would compete for call volumes throughout the three-year life of the contract. One of the companies was also the network services provider in the U.S., upon whose cooperation Nordia depended to make its solution work. Never before had such relay signals been possible across the Canada-U.S. border because of differing transmission standards.