Recent Call Center Cuts Point to Outsourcing

by Mike Bevel, CollectionIndustry.com

Little boys and girls who?ve longed dreamed of being call center representatives (?Please, mom, just one more phone call?? ?All right, but then it?s straight to bed.? ?Yay!?) might want to think about alternate career paths. Maybe something in the liberal arts, something with staying power.

Between Omaha-based Sitel Corp.?s location in Birmingham, AL, and Office Depot?s Boca Raton center, nearly 500 call center jobs have been cut or shipped overseas as part of outsourcing plans.

Sitel?s call-center 200+ layoffs appear to be attributed to a drop in customers. Bill Sims, Sitel’s vice president of investor relations, told the Birmingham News Thursday the company gave notice this week to affected employees, but that it hopes to welcome those same employees back, pending the addition of an as yet unnamed client.

Sitel?s announcement came as a surprise to the city of Birmingham ? especially since Sitel had announced upon its arrival in the Alabama city that it would be bringing between 800 and 1,100 jobs. Those numbers never quite got past 700.

Office Depot?s 250 employee cost-cutting move happens to coincide with its recent purchase of Papirius, a $56 million business-to-business office supply concern operating in the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Hungary and Slovakia.

What?s not so great for the employees out of call center jobs ends up garnering kudos from Wall Street, where such cost-cutting measures are looked on as a laudatory way of protecting the bottom line. Office Depot claims it will help those 250 former call center operators find work elsewhere. Office Depot’s Brian Levine said, ?Our goal is to place every single impacted associate in a new job? — troubling grammar notwithstanding (?impacted?? Really, Brian?).