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QVC to Sell or Lease Virginia Call Center and Make Work-from-Home Permanent
With the continued danger from the global COVID-19 pandemic, Americans have adapted to working from home in many industries, and the call center industry is no exception. Thanks to technology, agents can plug their headsets in, log onto the company’s cloud-based call center platform, and work effectively from home, communicating with managers, supervisors and coworkers using unified communication. For some call centers, the continued expense of a physical call center is something they’re cutting from the budget.
QVC, the television-based home-shopping retailer, recently announced that it has put its 52,911-square-foot Chesapeake, Virginia call center on the market, according to Kimberly Pierceall writing for The Virginian-Pilot. The company’s call center employees will work from home permanently.
QVC had already been transitioning call center employees to working from home when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, so it was in a good place to speed up the transition in response to the health crisis. The announcement to permanent transition to work-from-home was made in July. Now, QVC’s entire U.S. Customer Service & Experience division will work from home indefinitely.
While the company hasn’t said how many employees have been transitioned to work-from-home, Pierceall noted that the number runs into the hundreds.
“The office at 1553 River Birch Run North had once housed a large number of people,” she wrote. “As of early 2012, the company had more than 600 part-time and full-time employees based there, with some working from home even then. By March of that year, there were 370 layoffs leaving about 300 people at the office.”
QVC has seen its fortunes rise during the pandemic, as Americans took to “Quarantine Shopping” for comfort items in droves. The parent company of West Chester-based QVC, Qurate Retail, told the Philadelphia Business Journal in May that it has been seeing increased sales from new and reactivated customers thanks to shoppers staying home.
Edited by Maurice Nagle