Opening nine major U.S. customer service centers in a mere three years, Sprint PCS has fine-tuned a system for rapidly adding the labor others can’t even find.
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“Finding a place with higher unemployment is ideal. But you’re not going to find a U.S. community with 10 percent unemployment in this day and age; they simply don’t exist,” says Faerie Kizzire, Sprint PCS (www.sprintpcs.com) Customer Care senior vice president.
No, they don’t — a painfully familiar fact to firms struggling to expand U.S. operations. In fact, these labor-tight times are so dire that some firms are giving high-end hires brand-new BMWs.
But there’s a difference here in talking to Kizzire, widely considered a call center guru. Working on a seemingly labor-parched landscape, Kizzire and Sprint PCS have customer care centers blossoming in bulk: nine in three years, with the average facility employing almost 900 workers (see “Sprint PCS’s Building Blitz”).
In fact, Kizzire (pronounced ki-zyer) is sitting in a conference room inside Sprint PCS’s latest fast-track addition — a 950-employee center in Bolingbrook, Ill., 35 miles (59.5 km.) southwest of Chicago.
“U.S. labor is probably as tight now as it’s ever been. And customer service has been such a hot segment that labor has been very tight for the last 50 years,” Kizzire explains. “So you’ve got to find a way to appeal to employees when they have other choices.”
And people in Bolingbrook have choices. With Will County’s unemployment rate consistently hovering below 4 percent, this is not bottom fishers’ labor pool. But that only made the area more appealing, says Kizzire.
“That was part of the process we went through in determining this was a great place to be: Employees who choose you when they have other choices are great employees to get,” she says.
Sprint PCS’s decision got a robust amen from its Bolingbrook job fair. Two hours before the opening, hundreds were lined up outside. Sprint PCS opened early and saw more than 3,300 applicants in two days, a record turnout.
“Getting the right labor and the right facility make up about 90 percent of a call center’s major considerations,” Kizzire says. “By comparison, everything else is pretty insignificant.”
ABOVE RIGHT: “You can make any location work if you have to,” Kizzire says. “Ideally, you want a location with the fewest barriers, like what we found in Bolingbrook, a brand-new facility ready for our interior work.”
Chicago Network’s ‘Golden Spike’
The call center blitz typifies Sprint PCS’s blistering pace. It’s been a nonstop . . . well, sprint, since late 1996, when Overland Park, Kan.-based parent Sprint created the subsidiary, focused on the mushrooming market for wireless personal communications services (PCS). Already, Sprint PCS has spent a cool US$14 billion to build the largest U.S. all-digital, all-PCS wireless network.
The Bolingbrook facility where Kizzire sits marks a major milestone in that national network. Sprint PCS, in fact, hailed its Chicago-area service launch as “the golden spike” — likening it to the last link in North American’s transcontinental rail system.
Mark McHale, Sprint PCS Northeast regional headquarters communications director, calls the area “the digital divide.” The phrase aptly illustrates Chicago’s status as a key connecting city between Los Angeles and New York. That status has spurred Sprint PCS’s Second City location surge, going from zero employees three years ago to 3,000, including a regional headquarters.
The company’s network timing could hardly be better. Despite regulatory restrictions that initially created a pale patchwork, U.S. wireless is en fuego. By 2003, almost 1 billion wireless phones will be in use in the USA, and annual wireless phone sales will surpass even TVs, industry analysts predict.
Wireless Web the New Killer App
Expansion urgency at Sprint PCS is ramping up even higher these days, as it rushes to exploit its prime position at the axis of the current killer app: wireless plus the Web, a market ready to explode.
“After significant European and U.S. research, we feel mobile e-commerce is the next big opportunity,” says Andrew Cole, who heads the wireless practice for Boston-based consultants Renaissance Worldwide. “Handsets will become the e-commerce wallet for the majority of online purchases.”
Sensing that heady opportunity, Sprint PCS last September rolled out its wireless/Web combo, “Sprint PCS Wireless Web Connection.” Other offerings dot the market, but most analysts give the edge to Sprint PCS’s more sophisticated system and its more potent network.
“Unlike earlier similar offerings, Sprint PCS’s has a strong nationwide platform,” says Cole.
“With [its] emergent wireless data and e-commerce offers, it’s been one of the most innovative, well-placed carriers.”
Sprint PCS’s wireless savvy, most analysts agree, was what spurred MCI WorldCom’s $129 billion Sprint takeover late last year, the largest takeover ever. (At press time, a federal regulatory ruling was looming.) Adding Sprint PCS’s wireless wizardry to MCI WorldCom’s phone, data, entertainment and Net services could create the first truly global telecom player. In fact, MCI WorldCom is already swinging that way, announcing in mid-April its emphasis on high-end global data, Internet services and e-business. When a reporter called MCI WorldCom “a telephone company,” President and CEO Bernard Ebbers snapped, “That’s really an insult to us.”
Vigorously nodding, Kizzire says, “Oh, yes. The wireless Web market is going to just absolutely explode.”
Definitely. Today’s 6.6 million worldwide wireless Internet service subscribers will reach 400 million by 2003, skyrocketing to nearly 1 billion by 2005, predicts Banc of America Securities.
No wonder Sprint PCS is building at such a frenetic clip. In the wireless Web world, getting your network and call center support in place counts for everything.
Finding the Ideal Facility
What doesn’t count is real estate ostentation. By design, Sprint PCS’s Bolingbrook facility is devoid of exterior frou-frou. What’s vital goes on inside: customer service, one of the few competitive differentiations the Information Age has left standing.
The ordinary-looking building’s import isn’t lost on Pam McDonough, director of the Illinois Dept. of Commerce and Community Affairs (www.commerce.state.il.us) and a big player in recruiting Sprint PCS. “That new facility is a prototype for the kind of high-tech businesses we’re working to bring to Illinois,” she says.
Technology, in fact, is markedly raising the customer service bar. “With the Internet’s wealth of instantaneous information, customers are more knowledgeable than ever,” says Matt Graver, systems officer for DST Systems.
Sprint PCS’s Bolingbrook facility, a spec facility originally developed for multi-tenant distribution, gave it a leg up in meeting those mounting expectations.
Says Kizzire, “You can make any location work if you have to. Ideally, you want a location with the fewest barriers, like what we found in Bolingbrook, a brand-new facility ready for our interior work.”
Sprint PCS signed a $17 million lease for the facility last June 2nd. Then it got very, very busy. With the Jan. 15 Chicago-area service launch date looming, the Bolingbrook center fast-tracked its way to a Dec. 8th opening.
“None of our call centers are identical, but they’re very similar in floor plan layouts; so by experience we know how quickly we can bring them up,” Kizzire explains.
The 89-Day Rio Rancho Marvel
The whippet-quick Bolingbrook clip, though, didn’t even match Sprint PCS’s personal best for fast-tracking. This is a company in one big hurry, as it demonstrated in Rio Rancho, N.M.
“Rio Rancho was the first call center of that size (90,000 sq. ft./8,100 sq. m.) that we decided to very quickly build,” Kizzire recalls. “Even in Fort Worth (the Texas city in which the Sprint PCS Customer Care center is headquartered), the response was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, sure you will,’ ” she chuckles.
They did. From groundbreaking to move-in was a mere 89 days — a third of the time most call center experts consider the standard.
Part of Sprint PCS’s speed secret rests in two totally distinct real estate units: one focused on retail, one focused on call centers. Explains Kizzire, “Because call center real estate is so different from retail, Sprint PCS Customer Care has always had its own real estate team.”
Bolingbrook marked the first time that Customer Care’s real estate unit teamed with parent Sprint’s real estate arm. But it will retain its unique identity, Kizzire says.
“Sprint real estate at this point certainly helps us negotiate some of the contracts, but it’s a complement to the talent and skill we already have,” she says. “Our internal team is still in place.”
Overheated Markets: Keep Out
But even a fast-track facility is in big trouble if you build it and labor doesn’t come. Or stay. In addition to tight labor, the U.S. call center industry is plagued by 26 percent annual turnover. That cripples both continuity and the bottom line, as new rep recruiting and training costs $8,000 to $18,000, analysts estimate.
Accordingly, Sprint PCS’s search teams intensely analyze labor.
“We look very hard at 10-year population trends and at education rates, particularly high school graduation rates,” says Kizzire. “We draw a very strong percentage of college graduates, but we want areas that aren’t so heavily populated with college graduates that our jobs won’t appeal. You couldn’t do well with a call center in Silicon Valley.”
Will County’s work-force demographics matched up well with Sprint PCS’s needs. And the labor pool is deepening in one of Illinois’ fastest-growing counties. By 2020, today’s 460,000 residents will total between 722,794 and 805,906, estimates the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission.
But demographics alone don’t dictate decisions — not with the thin line between call center hotspot and not-so-hot spot.
“One of our big challenges is that corporate site selection processes are pretty consistent,” Kizzire explains. “So just when you discover a premium place that isn’t heavily populated with call centers, so do others. Omaha, Phoenix and Tucson, for example, were call center darlings 15 years ago, and most of us would never consider them now, because they’re way overheated.”
Those overheated environments fairly breed professional gypsies, forcing a dead-end strategy of paying top dollar du jour. And someone else inevitably follows and pays more.
But even call centers outside overheated markets face competition. Some industry analysts estimate that there are as many as 200,000 U.S. call centers — which makes competitive positioning a strategic concern.
“I strongly believe call center employees won’t commute more than 25 to 30 minutes, max,” Kizzire explains. “For example, in Salt Lake City, another heavily saturated market, call centers are located in a very long string. So if you locate on one end, you won’t draw employees from the other end.”
Easy access is another major labor-related concern. Located just off I-55 in The Crossroads business park, the Bolingbrook site met that need. It also satisfied Sprint PCS’s safety concerns for a heavily female staff at a 5-a.m.-to-midnight operation.
“Cities offer call centers lots of incentives, but we typically avoid downtowns,” says Kizzire.
“We’re not an 8-to-5 business, so our locations have to make employees feel secure early in the morning and late in the evening.”
Job Fairs a Key Tool
Finding what looks like available labor, though, is one thing. Successfully recruiting it is another. Today’s turnover woes, contends Human Technologies President and call center consultant Rosanne D’Ausilio, stem in part from recruiting processes that fail to weed out the wrong applicants and don’t engage the right ones.
In contrast, Sprint PCS’s weekend job fairs are designed “to be very distinctive, a big splash that impresses people right away that this is something different,” says Kizzire.
Different, it is. Rather than waiting in long lines to talk to somnolent interviewers, applicants are intensely involved throughout the two-hour experience. They’re either talking to Sprint PCS employees, filling out applications or experiencing what’s considered the most potent recruiting tool: a video in which Sprint PCS call center employees describe their work and demonstrate workstation operations.
And while Sprint PCS is piquing applicants’ interest, it’s simultaneously working behind the scenes.
“One reason for all the different things for applicants to do is that we’re screening for skills and backgrounds that fit our environment,” Kizzire explains. “With those who are a good fit, we schedule second interviews before they leave the job fair.”
Sprint PCS took some unconventional steps to draw Bolingbrook’s record turnout. It ran ads in selected movie theaters and placed billboards on I-55 near the new center that suggested how drivers could shorten commutes.
Building in Flexibility and Community
The building that spurred all that recruiting action, Sprint PCS’s 105,000-sq.-ft. (9,755-sq.-m.) center, can at first seem a bit foreboding — particularly the huge call agent area, which could easily hold a football field and a sizable crowd.
You soon adjust, though, and sense a certain order and calm, part of the $8 million Sprint PCS spent on fit-out, furniture and equipment. That design reflects a hard-won learning curve that began with Sprint PCS’s first call center in Fort Worth.
As Kizzire forthrightly explains, “Our one immovable was the launch service date. With fixed, limited time, we couldn’t design an end-all, be-all system.”
Humming background noise, for example, at first plagued the Fort Worth center. But despite Bolingbrook’s roomful of talking reps, the noise level is like an ordinary office setting. And there’s no white noise masking some ungodly clamor. Instead, constant conversations dissolve into carpeted floors, towering 26-ft. (7.8-m.) ceilings and Steelcase furniture with far better noise-baffling capacity than the first Fort Worth line.
Bolingbrook’s open area is also a departure from Fort Worth, where agents were divided into three large, separate rooms.
“We didn’t want people to feel like, ‘Gee, I’m kind of lost in this big floor,’ ” Kizzire says.
“But with our business’s volatility and growth, that didn’t work; we were constantly moving resources between rooms. So now we build centers with wide-open floor plans and as much flexibility as possible, allowing for small communities within the larger community.”
You can see those communities in Bolingbrook. Groups of 10 workstations, for example, are configured to face in toward a team leader, maximizing collaboration. Similarly, the “mission control area,” which regulates call flow, is positioned on the main floor, not in Fort Worth’s separate-room setting. And the only windows in the offices that ring the call center area face toward the interior.
The building’s emphasis on community is mirrored in the employee environment. Positive messages and performance indicators are pinned up everywhere. Agents who’ve received customer praise regularly receive awards in the large break room. Agents who aren’t on break can watch a live feed of the awards on the mounted TVs throughout the building.
“We really try to be a company they can be proud to work for, that’s more than ‘just a job’,” says McHale. Sprint PCS backs that commitment with its wallet. Agents who complete training before the centers open do community work and are paid by Sprint PCS. “We’ve painted schools, cleaned up parks, repaired houses, anything the communities told us they needed; and we continue to do that,” says McHale.
Fine-Tuning the Technology
In contrast to low-end call centers, Bolingbrook agents are armed with state-of-the-art telecom as they constantly navigate through reams of onscreen data. This place demands big pipes, and it has them.
But Sprint PCS’s original call center technology suffered from the haste to hit those immovable service launch dates. The system incorporated top-shelf products, but from many sources. As a result, Kizzire says, “At one point, agents literally had 20 different desktop icons.”
The system has since gone through three redesigns. Bolingbrook implemented the newest version, which cuts the maximum number of screens from 93 to 10 (and is rolling out in all Sprint PCS centers).
The ubiquitous Web is increasingly a call center technology staple, providing agents, for example, with troubleshooting wizards to pin down customer problems. And the burgeoning e-conomy is forging a hybrid of voice and online customer support. The Web, though, won’t likely eliminate the need for the human touch. “Call centers are the most important building block in supporting your Internet customers,” contends Don Steul, Internet customer service solutions manager for San Francisco-based Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories (www.genesyslab.com).
Sprint PCS is steadily increasing online customer options, including updating accounts and ordering new equipment.
Says Kizzire, “Customers who service themselves feel they’re in control; they have some of the highest satisfaction rates, survey information indicates. But technology not only allows us to leverage cost. Even more importantly, we can increase customer satisfaction while preserving people resources for complex problems that can’t be solved without direct assistance.”
Technology, though, has significantly altered agent qualifications, say Sprint PCS officials. Agents who could memorize voluminous information were hot tickets 10 years ago. But today’s ace agents are skillful listeners who can rapidly navigate to problem-solving data.
Strategy Rules, Not Incentives
A high-end incoming-call center, the Sprint PCS operation drew lots of incentive offers.
Picking Bolingbrook over runner-up Milwaukee yielded incentives, but they’re the levelheaded, businesslike sort. The state is supplying training grants, low-interest financing and infrastructure improvements. And the Will County Board, acting on the recommendation of Joliet/Will County Center for Economic Development Foundation (www.c-e-d.org), approved a five-year, $34,000 property tax abatement two months before the location decision.
The Sprint PCS project also drew one particularly high-profile recruiter: Gov. George Ryan, who’s working to create “the Digital Prairie.” Ryan personally called Sprint Chairman and CEO William Esrey to make the case for Illinois.
That’s what good recruiters do. But part of Sprint PCS’s smart system is that its location decisions are always umbilically attached to strategy.
“Incentives’ financial help is wonderful to get, and it can be a tiebreaker between competing locations,” Kizzire says. “But locating on incentives alone is the poorest decision you could make.
“For us, Bolingbrook was the right choice at the right time. We’ve got something here to build on.”
