Call Centers Weather Shifting Sands Of New Economy (cover) Call Center Growth on the Rise New Economy = New Facilities? India Emerges as Hot Spot European Growth Goes Exponential Canada: North America's Sweetheart New US Markets Emerge Request Information 
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SITE SELECTION SPECIAL FEATURE FROM JANUARY 2001
New US Markets Emerge The trend toward smaller metros is no more apparent than in the US. Although the traditional call center hubs are still attracting their share of investment, the labor is getting too hard to find or too expensive for these markets to remain viable locations for certain types of operations."Dallas, Phoenix and Tampa are overrun when it comes to average and lower-end call center users," says White. "But still some higher-end call center operations can function in those areas."
Michael Covey, technology analyst with Datamonitor, expects that as the labor markets grow tighter in the US, call center operations will move beyond the second-tier cities to the tertiary cities. "Cities like Omaha will continue to attract new customers, for instance," he explains. The move to the smaller metros makes sense not only in terms of finding labor, but the costs of labor as well. "If you go to a Tier I market, you'll be paying $14 an hour," says White. "Although you're fully staffed with a well-educated work force, you could have gone to a smaller community or another community that is not saturated and get the same labor after you train them for $10 or $11 an hour." Florida is one of the best examples of call center operations spreading out into the second-tier markets. Although the state is receiving a high amount of call center activity, "the call center investment seems to be migrating from the main hubs like Tampa and Orlando into some of the smaller hubs," Shapiro says. "Places like Tallahassee and Lakeland and Port St. Lucie, where we just helped locate QVC's call center -- all of these are getting more attention now than they might have a few years ago." Another secondary market that has caught a wave of call center investment, according to Shapiro, is central New York. Cities like Utica, Albany, Amherst and Henrietta are doing well. "Again, it's higher unemployment," explains Shapiro. "New York probably had about 2,000 call center job announcements last year, and almost all of them were in upstate New York." New York's activity mirrors that of two other new markets for US call center activity: the Central Valley in California and West Virginia. All three have higher numbers of available labor, and in terms of central New York and California, the costs of labor are cheaper than in other parts of the states. West Virginia is on a much different level of labor costs from these two states, and perhaps part of the reason behind its emergence as a call center hub. California's Central Valley has been the recipient of the fleeing of industry from the denser urban markets of Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego and the San Francisco area. "Stockton has been a primary beneficiary of all that," says Shapiro, and White agrees. Marriott, for example, announced a 250-person call center operation in Stockton last year. "We've been out there a couple of times looking at that market, because it does have a relatively attractive cost profile compared to the Bay Area," Shapiro explains. "Labor is a little bit more abundant, unemployment rates are a little bit higher, and there's not quite as much competition there." Stockton is joined by Fresno, Modesto and Redding as Central Valley call center hubs, says Shapiro. Recently, ACI Telecentrics chose Redding for its new 250-person call center. In the past couple of years, West Virginia has really sparkled as a call center star. Many of the call center announcements have been multiple announcements. Applied Card Systems, InfoCision and TeleTech Holdings have all made multiple call center announcements in the state in recent months.
Source: Conway Data Inc.'s New Plant Database
"We saw almost 3,000 call center jobs in West Virginia last year," says Shapiro. "They had nine major announcements, and most of these are small towns. But 3,000 jobs in West Virginia says a lot about call centers and how they're hunting places with higher unemployment." 
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