Site Selection: What is the mission of the association?
Kevin E. Johnson: We share best practices, we leverage the association’s collateral strength in numbers in working with vendors, and we lobby the government, though we haven’t had to do that as yet. There is value in numbers. The main areas we have focused on are leveraging each other’s networking capabilities in terms of sharing best practices and putting in place a call center pre-employment training program housed at the Honolulu Community College. We have about 50 percent of the funding we need for that, and we’ll launch the program when we get the rest, hopefully in the early part of 2002.
As a trade group, we understand our industry. The government and vendors understand us, and we know what we’re good for and what we’re not good for. We want to bring the right companies to Hawaii, and most importantly, take care of the ones that are here. We’re not trying to lure every company that has call centers here. That’s not our niche.
SS: What is the training program’s objective?
KEJ: Hawaii really doesn’t have a work-force shortage, it’s more of a skills shortage, and we needed to develop a training program for our own industry to which we can send people who are a little short on skills. They would take a three- or six-week course depending on the skills required to enter the industry. Most of us have four- to eight-week training programs, and we can’t afford that extra two or three weeks to teach someone keyboarding, for instance. We want the people that walk through the door to have the basic entry-level skills. We certify people on soft skills, conflict resolution and so forth, so hiring is less of a gamble. It’s a win-win deal in terms of it helping people find jobs and helping us to find recruits.
and most importantly, take care of the ones that are here.”
— Kevin E. Johnson
SS: How active is the call center industry in Hawaii currently in terms of new centers opening?
KEJ: We’ve had a couple new centers open up in the past year — a 50-seat center for Metro One, and a collections agency opened a center in Hilo. But we have also seen another trend, which is where large, international companies with a small presence here are closing those centers for economies of scale reasons. Sprint PCS, for example, is closing its 40-seat center here; their centers on the mainland are 1,200 to 1,900 seats. Northwest Airlines, too, has consolidated and closed its 40-seat center in Honolulu.
We’re in the business to bring centers out here, but I can’t blame these companies for realizing it’s not economically feasible to have one little office here with giant centers elsewhere. That’s just a sign of the times. The growth we do see is not so much from new companies coming here, but existing companies increasing the number of seats they have, because they are doing well. United Airlines is a classic example. They announced last January that they would double the size of their Honolulu center, and they’re now in a new building in the midst of increasing to 450 seats. They found that the performance of the Hawaii center is actually much better than the rest of their centers, and that tends to be the case with companies that operate networks of call centers. An AT&T call center has grown by 30 seats in the last year.
SS: What makes Hawaiian call centers unique relative to their West Coast counterparts?
KEJ: We have three main advantages. The first is our people. We are a very service-based culture — it’s called the Aloha spirit. Another is our time zone, and the third is that we are 100 percent digital. We probably have more bandwidth than any other state, because we are the hub of the fiber ring for the entire Pacific Ocean. It comes from the mainland to here and then goes out to Asia, so we’re big on bandwidth.
From a cost standpoint, it is a little difficult to compete with the mainland, because it’s more expensive to live here. On the other hand, the average turnover we have measured is 17.4 percent. If you take into account that the industry average is 26 percent, the numbers work out pretty well, and average tenure and job satisfaction levels are higher as well.
SS: What is Hawaii’s chief competitor as a location for call centers?
KEJ: The target of the Call Center Hawaii Committee [an economic development affiliate of the association] is not so much companies deciding between the West Coast and Hawaii for a new center, but rather companies considering the Philippines, Australia, India and Hawaii. That’s where we are trying to compete.
And we’re not competing for customer service call centers per se, but rather for what I call professional services call centers. We don’t have the volume to support a 1,000-seat center. It’s not possible with our demographics. We’re after the niche players, the 100 seats and smaller specialty centers. We have an excellent base of technology people coming out of our colleges, and the talent graduates and goes to the mainland. It’s brain drain, and people are concerned about it. So we are trying to create an industry in which those people can go to work here in Hawaii. Call centers today want to attract knowledge workers, because they are professionals in their field. We want the centers located here that attract those types of employees. American Healthways has opened a 45-seat center here, for example, and every one of the people that man the phones are registered nurses. Professional services call centers are the way of the future.
