Copyright 1998 Times Printing Company
The Chattanooga Times
June 29, 1998, Monday
SECTION: Local; Pg. A1
LENGTH: 732 words
HEADLINE: Chattanooga hearing call of phone jobs
BYLINE: By Susanne Sachsman, The Chattanooga Times
BODY:
Calls for hotel reservations, catalog orders and customer complaints are increasingly answered under one roof -- a call center.
Lined with cubicles filled with computers, headsets and operators, these call centers will dominate the future of customer relations. And answering phones has become one of the fastest-growing jobs in Chattanooga.
A study by the Direct Marketing Association estimated that the call center industry will record a 53 percent growth in 1998.
Chattanooga's call centers are following the trend, expanding to offer hundreds of above-minimum-wage jobs with opportunities for advancement. Since AT&T Solutions chose to locate one of its call centers at Eastgate last year, nearly 2,000 telephone marketing jobs have been -- or soon will be -- added in Chattanooga.
"Just about any company with a customer service focus is expanding their call center business," said Mark Campbell, co-owner of Manpower in Chattanooga. "It's just a new function of customer service. They are more interested in customer input."
Matrixx Marketing plans to hire 200 to 250 more employees this summer to staff phones for both incoming and outgoing calls, director Mark Morrill said. The center houses hotel reservations for Motel 6 and customer service for Pfizer as well as AT&T Wireless phone sales.
Harrison Fulfillment Services Call Center hired 140 employees in June and will hire 300 new employees by September. Harrison's Chattanooga office mainly focuses on outbound sales calls, director of human resources Virginia Govan said.
Another company, CenturyTel Telecommunications Inc., is about to break ground for a new phone center that will employ the equivalent of 250 full-time jobs. That center should be ready to open in 1999. As soon as those seats fill, CenturyTel will expand, adding a piece to the building and 300 more full-time jobs. Almost all of CenturyTel's jobs will be answering incoming calls.
Provident Cos. is also studying a plan to expand its Chattanooga call center by consolidating more than a dozen of its call centers located across the country.
In today's tight labor market, the businesses are attracted to Chattanooga by its wages, which are 16 percent below the national average, and unemployment, which is higher than many surrounding cities. Chattanooga is also known for having employees with good work ethics, college students looking for jobs and fiber connections, said Robert Wales, CenturyTel director of operations.
Call centers have shed the term telemarketing, which was coined by AT&T in the early '80s for selling long-distance service, as they have grown into a more than $700 billion industry. And as a whole, these operators answer customers' 1-800 calls many more times than they dial out.
"This is not telemarketing. You think of telemarketing as selling Ginsu knives. This business is outsourcing. Companies who have done the work internally are giving to companies that specialize," said Mark Morrill, director of Matrixx Marketing, a call center at Eastgate.
Call centers have taken over interactions between customers and products or services, from catalog sales to ticket transactions. And the business continues to expand as companies that answer customers' calls internally increasingly hire specialists who cost less and satisfy customers better. The call centers also share customer feedback with businesses to improve service.
Every day, 80 million people call the AT&T 800 number alone, and in 1997, people dialed toll-free numbers 27.6 billion times, said Michael Llach, communications manager for the American Association of Telemarketers.
Some businesses in Chattanooga, such as Provident, continue to house their own customer service, and those companies are also expanding their manpower.
But even with lowering unemployment rates, these three large call centers and smaller in-house call centers, CenturyTel is not worried about competing for employees.
"Chattanooga's relatively untapped," Wales said.
And if there is any wage competition between the centers, the employees will benefit, Campbell said.
Dialing for jobs
* Matrixx Marketing, up to 1,000 new employees, starting wage $7.10 an hour
* Harrison Fulfillment Services, 300-420 new employees, starting wage $7.75 an hour
* CenturyTel Telecommunications, 250-550 new employees, starting wage at market rates |
