The Upside And Downside To The Triad's Call Center Surge

Call center firms are booming in the Triad. These large operations handle everything from customer complaints to billing collection for some of the largest corporations in America. Within just the past year, three leading call center firms have announced their intention to expand their services here, and hire potentially hundreds of new customer service representatives in the process.

Given that the Greensboro-High Point metro area has lost nearly 5,000 jobs in the past decade, the planned addition of call center positions has been welcome news. Many of the new jobs are full-time with benefits, and they're available to people with a high school diploma.

But these are also relatively low-paying positions that typically offer little in the way of job security, and even less in terms of transforming the local economy. The Triad Business Journal's Katie Arcieri has been studying the industry, its impact on the local economy, and the call center employees themselves.

She spoke with WFDD's David Ford.

On the industry's recent growth here in the Triad:

The Triad is a really attractive place for call centers, partly because there's a great public transportation system, there's an available workforce here, and there's a lower cost of doing business. Companies can set up a call center operation for a fairly low cost in an existing building or they can expand a building, and they don't have to pay an arm and a leg to do that.

We've been seeing at least three [call center firms] announce major expansions: Anomaly Squared, Alorica, and Global Conduit have all announced hundreds of new call center jobs since the fall of last year. So, this is something that local economic developers are encouraging, because they say it can really help a wide range of people get jobs, and jobs with benefits. We need jobs that are stepping stones to bigger jobs, or jobs at the high end. We can't just put all of our eggs in one basket, especially in this region that has still suffered from a number of job losses since the manufacturing crisis.  

On who benefits from call center jobs and how:

These jobs provide flexible schedules, and supplemental income for maybe a person who's just getting back to work, a military spouse who needs a job, even chronically unemployed people or the disabled. And both Alorica and Anomaly Squared say that they have formalized career advancement programs. You can move from customer service representative to quality assurance manager to a recruiting manager, and maybe even someone in IT.  They're saying that you can actually have a good career here. So, I think there are a lot of advantages to having these jobs in the region.

And this industry has a multiplier effect, as well. Commercial real estate agents want tenants in their buildings. So, a call center can easily set up an operation and get started with very little equipment and capital to create a big impact in a short period of time.

On the downsides of call center work:

In Guilford County, the average annual salary is about $46-thousand per year, and you're seeing a lot of these companies like Anomaly Squared and Alorica pay about thirty percent less. So, we're talking estimated salaries between $19-thousand and $24-thousand. That can be good for a two-person household that's creating income, but that really isn't enough sometimes to get by. And these call center jobs are very ephemeral. A lot of times, they come, they set up even large centers with hundreds of employees, and then they lose a contract and suddenly those jobs are gone. American Express is a really good example of that. They had a big operation over at the Piedmont Triad International Airport, and then they wound up closing that operation leaving a lot of those folks out of a job. So, some of the analysts I've spoken to say that when you go into a job like this, you kind of expect that there is that risk.

You can find Katie Arcieri's article in Friday's edition of the Triad Business Journal.