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Rochester Call Center for Xerox Hiring Hundreds, Part of Recent Repatriation Trend

By David Sims, TMCnet Contributing Editor

You may have heard how companies traditionally outsource their call center jobs, the reason being that they can generally get the same job done less expensively overseas. Xerox is part of a growing trend to repatriate those jobs, betting that homeshoring their call centers will provide that improved service customers are looking for. Company officials recently announced a 500-plus employee call center in Webster, NY. 

According to democraticandchronicle.com, the hiring will fill out over the next couple years as 200 are being hired now. 

Connie Harvey, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Xerox Commercial Services, told local newspaper The Democrat-Chronicle, “As Xerox continues its transition to a services-led company, we’re looking for people who are great listeners and problem solvers, and who understand the importance of providing a consistently superior customer experience."

Harvey told the newspaper that the call center will service a "large wireless telephone company client." New York state is kicking in $5 million worth of state tax credits and a $1 million grant, and Monroe County's offering $271,000 in tax credits to attract the call center.

The advantages to repatriating call center jobs is appealing to more companies these days. Last year, according to business journal Mass. Market, Boston-based Carbonite, decided to move all call center operations from India to Maine.

Carbonite CEO David Friend told the journal that his company, which provides data backup services, did it for customer service reasons after seeing how much customers preferred working with their existing Boston-based center: “India worked fine, but at the end of every customer interaction, we asked how you would rate the whole experience (and) the U.S.-based operation just blew India away."

Yes the employees will cost more in Maine -- two to three times as much -- but Friend said that after running the numbers, overall he'll do better giving everybody American-based customer support. Plus with the efficiencies of Maine labor (considerably less expensive than Massachusetts labor, he said), he won't need as many agents as he does in India.