Customer contact firm C3 picks its spots and staffs them in record time.
The numbers are large and the expansion is rapid from Plantation, Fla.-based BPO firm Customer Contact Channels (C3), which this summer proceeded to add a cumulative 2,000 U.S. jobs with expansions at recently opened facilities in Twin Falls, Idaho, and Salt Lake City, Utah, and by locating two new customer contact centers in Tucson, Ariz., and Waco, Texas.
Only a year old, the company, led by former executives from Precision Response Corp., already operates 14 locations worldwide. Its sole Florida operation is its headquarters, though leaders told the Miami Herald in August that they plan to open a contact center in the state’s Panhandle within the year. Other facilities operate in Ashland, Ohio; San Juan, Puerto Rico; Bogota, Colombia; San Jose, Costa Rica; Dalian, China; Mumbai, India; Sofia, Bulgaria; Glasgow, Scotland; and Manila, Philippines, where the company operates two centers and is adding another 1,000 seats of capacity.
According to the Business Process Association of the Philippines, as of December 2010, about 530,000 employees comprise the BPO labor force of over 800 IT-BPO companies in that country. IBM alone is hiring by the hundreds. But despite the vaunted work ethic, attitude, friendly voices and accent attributes of Filipinos, companies increasingly are finding good things to say about those same attributes in U.S. citizens.
C3’s plans call for 7,000 total hires globally by the end of September, with 4,500 of them in the United States. The breakdown goes like this: up to 600 in Tucson; 500 in Waco; 600 more in Salt Lake City (bringing payroll there to nearly 1,000) and somewhere between 200 and 300 more in Twin Falls, where more than 600 were already on the payroll (see the Idaho Spotlight in the Jan. 2011 issue of Site Selection).
The company is cagey about customer identification, though it has stated that the Tucson facility will support a Fortune 100 healthcare company.
“We’re rapidly growing right now, and proud to be part of the economic recovery,” said David Epstein, chairman and co-CEO of C3.
