Call of Duty

In Northwest Florida, Pensacola got the nod earlier this year for the $13-million call center for the Navy Federal Credit Union, to be built on 19.43 acres (7.86 hectares) in Bell-Heritage Oaks Commerce Park. Navy Federal currently employs over 2,700 people at their Vienna, Virginia headquarters which encompasses one million square feet of offices, with an additional 1,400 employed in 96 branch offices around the world.
        The choice came after an 18-month site search led by Preben "Ebb" Ebbesen, senior vice president for management engineering, with help from Staubach Co. The initial nationwide evaluation lasted six months, launched by the credit union's president, Brian McDonnell, in March 2001.
        "We eventually decided to look at Norfolk's tidewater area, Jacksonville, and Pensacola," says Ebbesen. Once around 20 sites in each location were scrutinized, the team narrowed it to a dozen. At that point, Virginia looked to have the edge, not only because the credit union was already there (in Vienna), but because they still had three sites in the running compared to one in Pensacola. But wages and potential turnover pulled them toward the Panhandle.
        "Our original objectives were to find a location that would reduce our wage costs," says Ebbesen. "We wanted an opportunity to attract and retain a skilled call center employee work force. At headquarters, we have several call centers employing about 600 people, and turnover has varied between 50 percent and 60 percent."
        Paying D.C.-area wages with that amount of turnover was a less attractive equation than the high quality and lower wages in Pensacola, which is deemed to have around 36,000 under-employed workers.
        "We interviewed some of the other call centers in the area," says Ebbesen, "and we were pleased with the answers from those call center managers that the work force is spoken highly of in terms of ability, quality and stability. But the ultimate things that tipped the scale were the incentive packages offered by Escambia County and the State of Florida."
        Those packages included goodies from Workforce Florida, which is doing all the recruiting and pre-qualifying, as well as paying for on-the-job training for up to three months after initial training; Pensacola Junior College, which will help provide and pay for training and the space to do it in. Key to the entire project, says Ebbesen, is the employee focus.
        "We want to make it as rewarding as possible to work in," he says. "From the inside, every single one of the people who will be working on the phone will have a view of the trees and water."
        Built for 300 seats, the center could expand to as many as 500 positions in several years, a possibility implied in the credit union's option on some adjacent acreage.

First Coast First Choice
for Regional Centers

Jacksonville remains a headquarters and services capital. Recent locations have come from CSX Transportation, BellSouth, Fidelity National and CitiBank.
        Fidelity is moving its corporate headquarters to the city from Santa Barbara, Calif., following its acquisition of Alltel and its 500,000-sq.-ft. (46,450-sq.-m.) office complex downtown.
        "We considered many factors over the last several months in concluding that serious consideration must be given to a relocation of our corporate headquarters," said Fidelity Chairman and CEO William P. Foley, II, in April. "By moving into the large campus that we now own in Jacksonville, we can eliminate the cost of leasing office space for our corporate headquarters. The southeastern coast location, the Eastern Time zone and the availability of a major airport all provide more efficient access to many of our major customers in the large business centers on the east coast and in the central and southern parts of the country."
        Ah, yes, the client proximity answer rises again. It seems that new business begets new business, and the Southeast U.S. is not about to let go of that welcome trend.