Call Center Management Featured Article
Site Selection Considerations for Call Centers
If you’re considering launching a new contact center, you may be wondering where to do it. Should you expand your current facilities? Look for an outsourcing partner? Or spend your money on a new start-up? In order to fully evaluate your options, you need to explore where you might open a new contact center. Location matters, as some states are highly call center friendly and others are simply expensive.
Properly siting a new contact center is a complex process, according to King White (News - Alert), CEO of Site Selection Group.
“When evaluating locations for new call centers, companies evaluate a variety of factors including labor availability, labor cost, accessibility, dialect, bilingual skills, economic incentives, tax conditions and real estate availability,” said King. “It is a complicated process and you have to also understand the qualitative aspects of a community before making a final decision to open a new call center,” he said.
Following are some considerations for locating new call centers.
How many call centers does your location have? If there are too few call centers in the region, you might have trouble attracting talent, particularly for manager and supervisor positions. If there are too many, however, you might wind up with high turnover from agents being lured away by competitors offering an extra fifty cents per hour.
How friendly is the region to call centers? Some states and municipalities, recognizing the importance of call centers in high employment, reach out specifically to call center companies to attract them with tax incentives, suitable buildings ready to move into, and other perks.
What real estate is available? For a call center, you’ll need a large building with a lot of open space, a great deal of parking, ample security (particularly if you’re going to run three shifts round-the-clock), state-of-the-art telecom connections, break rooms, adjacent residential areas (no one is going to commute two hours for a call center job) and an attractive location. (No one wants to work in a call center in a factory building, for example, or a former slaughterhouse.)
What’s the labor cost? There’s a reason that most U.S. call centers are in the southeast U.S. and not (for example) in New York City. Labor will be your biggest expense, so ensuring that you’re paying a competitive rate is critical. Also consider whether you need workers with basic skills, or workers with some additional experience such as IT. You may not find the latter in the cheapest call center locations.
Have you checked the incentives recently? Some states that were formerly call center-friendly may not be so anymore. Conversely, some regions that don’t have a reputation for call centers may be trying to attract them. (For example, New Mexico, which was once highly call center friendly, is now reducing the incentives it offers.) Ensure your incentive information is up to date.
Before you decide to expand your call center capacity, be sure you have all the right figures in hand so you know what’s the smartest path for your organization. Otherwise, you’ll be stuck in the “wrong place” for a long time.
Edited by Maurice Nagle