Cadillac Cubicles
With
about eight of every 100 workers
employed at call centers,
Jacksonville is no stranger to
headsetwearers. But in June,
Fidelity Investments drew attention
after it announced a new call
center. It wasn’t just
the number of jobs — 400
by next June and 1,200 in four
years — or the $5 million
in incentives that Gov. Jeb Bush
pledged to recruit the company.
What sets the Fidelity center
apart is the education level
required to work there — a
college degree and a license
to sell securities are highly
preferred — and the pay:
An average of $50,000 annually. “They
are highly skilled, professional
jobs,” says Mike Shamrell,
a Fidelity spokesman.
The
upscale trend isn’t
universal. In Melbourne, MedSolutions
recently opened a 132-employee
call center. Most workers need
only a high school diploma and
will make in the low- to mid-$20,000s,
with the 30 to 40 nurses earning
more, says Jessica Riley, marketing
director for the Franklin, Tenn.,-based
company.
Going
forward, the industry in Florida
is likely to see a
mix of more traditional low-end
call-center jobs along with higher-wage
posts like the Fidelity center. “It’s
a maturing of the industry,” says
John H. Boyd of The Boyd Co.,
a Princeton, N.J.- based site-selection
consulting firm. “The skill
sets are more demanding.”
Fewer Disrupted Dinners
One industry segment not showing
growth in Florida is telemarketing.
While the public most identifies
call centers with outbound sales
operations, telemarketing makes
up less than 15% of the overall
callcenter market. The federal
no-call list and public disgust
over unsolicited calls have sapped
telemarketing, and telemarketing
employment in Florida fell nearly
9% to 32,400 from 2004 to 2005,
according to the state Agency
for Workforce Innovation. (The
count, however, is inexact. Call-center
employment numbers are difficult
to track. For example, an inhouse
call center for a financial services
company likely would be counted
under financial services rather
than telemarketing.)
Plenty of Churn
Florida’s low wages and
growing population have made
it attractive for call-center
operators ever since telephone
deregulation eliminated distance-ofcall
as a driver of costs, enabling
the industry to move out of the
middle of the country. In the
past four years, Florida netted
3,334 call-center jobs, says
David Butler, executive director
of the National Association of
Call Centers and director of
the Call Center Research Laboratory
at the University of Southern
Mississippi. The industry nationally
grows by 8% to 15% per year. “Florida
and Texas have historically been
very strong markets, and they
trend similarly,” Butler
says.
The growth masks considerable
churn, however. From 2002 to
2006, 10 centers expanded in
Florida, and two contracted.
Twenty closed, and 18 opened,
the national call center association
reports. And the churn continues:
In September, Delta Air Lines
closed its 500-worker Miramar
call center and another in Alabama
to save $2.7 million annually.
Fort Lauderdale-based PRC announced
that a 450-plus employee call
center that provides tech support
for an undisclosed wireless provider
has opened in the Palatka facility
that Tampa-based Sykes Enterprises
closed in 2004.
Frontier,
a Stamford, Conn.-based provider
of telecom and internet,
was scheduled to open a call
center in DeLand last month with
almost 500 workers — in
a building vacated by another
center operator.
In addition to lower-paying
call-center jobs, Florida can
expect more higherpaying positions
in the future, with many employees
expected to have college degrees.
Weather and Workers
John
H. Boyd of site-selection consulting
firm The Boyd Co.
in Princeton, N.J., says that
while “there’s no
perfect location,” the
recent spate of active hurricane
seasons in Florida has raised
concerns in an industry preoccupied
with information assurance and
data security. “Florida
is working against trends rather
than with them,” Boyd says. “There
has to be some very compelling
advantages on the plus side of
the ledger to sign off on a call
center in Florida.” Florida
also has a hefty 6.8% communications
services tax that pushes up the
cost of operating here.
Florida
remains attractive because
of its cheap labor, however.
Labor costs can make up between
70% and 85% of the cost of operating
a center. “It all comes
down to labor costs, the demographic,
the profile,” says Jim
Trobaugh, who heads CB Richard
Ellis’ national call-center
real estate practice based in
Phoenix. A 50 cents per hour
labor savings at a 500-employee
center translates into a $520,000
savings annually, Trobaugh notes,
adding wryly, “You wonder
why people went offshore.” Indeed,
growth in call centers in the
Caribbean, Canada and other locales
abroad continues. While Florida
is expensive compared to those,
it remains relatively inexpensive
compared to most other U.S states.
Competition
for workers is more the issue
in Florida than hurricanes.
Once a market has more than 2%
of its labor force employed at
call centers, employee turnover
and wages go up, Trobaugh says.
Jacksonville call centers employ
7.9% of the overall labor force.
All else being equal, “I
wouldn’t go to Jacksonville
because of all the call centers
there,” he says.
Fidelity
Investments, however, with
its unusual wages and education
requirements, found Jacksonville
to its liking. The cost of doing
business there and incentives
helped, says Fidelity’s
Mike Shamrell. Also, “We
definitely saw the labor pool
as being attractive.”
Incentives
Since
2000, Florida has provided
$12 million in incentive grants
to train 18,918 employees at
48 call centers. In 2000, to
bring a call center of Tampabased
Sykes Enterprises to Palatka,
Putnam County offered a $3-million
grant, a five-year property tax
break, state incentives and a
22-acre site. Sykes closed the
facility in 2004. Fort Lauderdale-based
PRC, Florida’s largest
homegrown, third-party call-center
operator, has taken it over.
Delta, which closed a Miramar
center in September, didn’t
stay long enough to collect on
the nearly $500,000 in incentives
it got from the city and Broward
County in 2003.
