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Hosted Call Center Closing, but Some Workers May Get Reprieve

By TMCnet Staff

The reality of call center work is that it is largely subject to the whims of the businesses that contract them to complete customer service. It is less of a factor when companies take call center work into their own hands; however, enterprises that function strictly as call centers must remain in the graces of their business clients or they could end up falling apart.

One of the most recent cases of structure falling out from underneath a call center operation took place in Australia with the Sykes (News - Alert) Inc. call center in Sydney. A local news source, the Cape Breton Post, noted recently that Sykes only had one client, Bell Canada (News - Alert), and that Bell’s closure of its site in Sydney in January 2015 will occur because of “market conditions.” It could not be any vaguer than that. Unfortunately for Sykes employees, that vague explanation will mark the end of their jobs.

With Bell’s closure, Sykes will go down alongside it. All 130 call center employees there will lose their jobs. That has the Post wondering whether or not the employees will get a reprieve. In fact, there are a number of employees who will have the chance of working for Sykes’ Tampa, Fla., site as virtual employees and will be able to work from home. They could join the reported more than 7,500 people who work as “home-based agents” that already work in those types of positions throughout the U.S.

The Sykes closure has caused some critics to denounce the nature of call center work as fragile. However, the Post makes the point that call centers can boost local economies with the numerous jobs they bring to the regions in which they are stationed. There are certainly cases like the one mentioned above where call centers go out of business due to unforeseen circumstances – that is the nature of business though. It is not necessarily only a phenomenon that occurs to customer service representatives and their parent companies.

TMC (News - Alert) has reported that, at least in the U.S., call center work is booming. News reports emanating from states such as Michigan, Texas, Missouri, and Florida show an increased willingness for companies to expand their operations and hire hundreds of new employees. Much of the expansion appears to be occurring because of changes in the U.S. national healthcare system. Insurance providers are expanding their staff overall and the ways in which they reach out to customers – who now demand multiple channels such as voice, video, and text as avenues for communicating with their chosen organizations.

This trend reflects in Sykes’ attempt to hire employees for virtual work. It shows that call center agents can be effective through advanced software that needs only an Internet connection to link agents with customers through any number of channels. Indeed, the Post notes that call centers can bring money to local economies and can potentially teach employees new skills that they can transfer to future positions within their current companies or others perhaps years down the road. The closure of the single Sykes facility may highlight one part of the underlying nature of how call centers function, but it is not the entire story. In part, they may be fragile; on the other side of that coin, though, they can offer individuals and communities worthwhile assets while they are in operation.