Jobs Plentiful in Booming Phone Services

As 1-800 numbers and 24-hour services increase, so do the number of people needed to answer the calls.

The result has been explosive growth in the size of the phone center work force across the country.

There are currently about 60,000 call centers in the United States, with another 10,000 expected to open this year, said Dianna Walta, call center systems director for Intecom, a Dallas-based company that designs and manufactures telephone switches.

Even at its current level, “you’re looking at about 3 million agents on line or about 3% of the U.S. work force answering calls in a call center environment,” she said.

In the Dallas area alone, experts estimate there are 300 to 500 call centers, each with an average of 200 agents taking calls.

And in Phoenix, the call center market has grown 10-fold in the past five years employing an estimated 50,000 people, according to the Greater Phoenix Economic Council.

Audrey Tennant, an instruction designer at Richland College, a community college in Dallas, said she researched call centers and found they are involved in banking, shopping, travel, technology and customer service.

“Every industry has call centers,” she said.

And that means every industry needs call center agents--a reality that is straining the available labor pool.

“As the growth of these call centers proliferates, we are competing with other companies,” said Rick Wimpee, a customer information center manager of about 400 call center agents working for TU Electric.

“We lose our wonderful people to better jobs,” he said.

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As the competition for workers has increased, so have salaries and benefits.

Those with no experience can start at $8 an hour, and the average salary for a call center agent is $9.28 an hour including benefits, Tennant said.

“The pay was more than I expected,” said 25-year-old Jackie Cooper, who had worked in retail and at a grocery store before joining TU Electric in April. “It’s much better.”

The job doesn’t require a high school education or previous training. Instead call centers are looking for people who can listen, acquire basic typing skills and be able to sit in one place for long periods of time.

To try to answer the demand for agents, some colleges have started developing training curricula. The need is so great that 80% of call centers surveyed said they would be willing to provide tuition reimbursement to students, according to Richland College, which will begin offering six-week training courses beginning in August.

And while Wimpee admits the round-the-clock hours can be “confining” for some workers, there are employees who prefer it.

Fran Hilton chose the 4 p.m.-to-midnight shift so she and her husband can take turns caring for their two young children.

“It meets my personal needs,” she said.

Because of the demand, people are being encouraged to look at call center work as a career, rather than a job.

“It used to be people worked in a call center when they were going through college to earn their bread and butter. But today, the technology of a call center is unbelievable. The industry is offering tremendous career tracks for people,” Tennant said.

“They’re desperate to find more and more people to answer these calls,” Walta said.