American call center businesses are hiring. That’s the message to the job market, which each week seems to see another call center facility expanding or opening.
The latest expansion comes courtesy of New York -based iQor (News - Alert) , which runs customer service call centers for businesses, and offers complete customer care solutions. iQor’s services include technical support and billing inquiries for some of America’s best known brands. iQor plans to hire around 80 workers in New York state who will take inbound customer service calls, and the company recently held a job fair to interview potential new workers. Once the new teams are in place, they will support a growing major utility with a large New York presence, a company spokesman told Buffalo BusinessFirst.
“Building brands,” as the iQor call center plans to do, may be part of the reason why call centers are booming once again in the U.S. Many of the new call center postings that show up in the trade press each week may be due in part to call centers returning from foreign shores. While outsourcing to nations such as India and the Philippines has always been considered to be a great way to save money, many companies found the drawbacks too severe: agents with hard-to-understand accents are a turn-off for many Americans, as is the concept of sending jobs offshore during a time of high U.S. unemployment.
For others, the call center business has become more than just a process to take customer calls. Today’s integrated call center can act as “the bridge” for a multichannel customer strategy that includes not only telephone calls, but other media such as Web, e-mail, social media and even mobile apps. Simply taking calls at low cost – once the strength of foreign outsourced contact centers – is no longer enough, and call centers have become the face of companies and their brands. Showing a bad face, so the conventional wisdom goes, is a quick way to erode customer loyalty and lose business.
In an era in which many products and services are commoditized, smart companies are relying on their excellent brand reputation. Outsourcing the customer service function to the cheapest bidder is seldom the best way to build brand integrity and reputation. It’s critical today that companies maintain a 360-degree customer view in their call centers, which means that the traditional call center “boiler room” no longer cuts it. Today’s contact centers are sophisticated facilities rich in data and able to turn any customer query – regardless of what channel it comes in on – into an opportunity to delight, and therefore retain, the customer.
The good news for the U.S. job market is that smart companies are finding the very best place to create multimedia customer delight is by opening new contact centers and expanding existing facilities: right here on U.S. shores.
Edited by Jamie Epstein