By Sofia Rowley
Feb. 1, 2006

For more than a year, Tracy Lorme had been promising her family a trip to Walt Disney World. But with three children under six and a full-time job supervising transfusion services at Meridian Health in Neptune, N.J., Lorme, 38, had little time to plan the details. So when her employer began offering a concierge service through Boston-based Circles as one of its benefits, Lorme decided to give it a try. She called Circles just a few weeks before the trip, and a representative booked the flights and theme park tickets, arranged for a rental car with car seats for the kids and even managed to get them into a breakfast with Cinderella, an event that is usually booked three months out. "It was maybe three phone calls and a couple of e-mails," Lorme says. "It saved me so much time."

That's appealing to businesses that are anxious to recruit and retain talent and to help employees get more done on the job. Circles' surveys indicate that on average, employees save about 2.5 hours each time they use the service. That's time they're devoting to work, rather than sinking into comparing plane ticket prices on the Web.

Concierge services had declined in recent years, after catching on during the boom years of the late '90s as an extension to work/life benefits packages, but demand for the services has picked up again. Essentially, Circles and its competitors provide employees with virtual personal assistants 24 hours a day. For a flat rate charged to employers, representatives will help employees with nearly anything. Employees typically use the service to book vacation packages, comparison shop for expensive gifts, track down the cheapest dry cleaner in town or help plan parties.

These services have become especially popular among health care companies trying to recruit and retain nurses, many of whom balance family commitments and work long shifts on off-hour schedules. Lorme's company, Meridian Health, started using the program just after Labor Day in 2004, and already it has been a real hit. Over a two-month period this fall, Circles received more than 2,000 employee requests, says Wendy Edelson, who is director of employee labor relations and also a nurse. "It's something we now put in all our advertising and our new-hire packets," says Edelson. "For the benefit, it's worth every cent."