The Art of the Call

Hollywood has actors. Prague has painters and Sunnyvale, systems engineers. In Glouster, you'll find fishermen. Vegas ... croupiers. And Fort Myers? More and more, the regional occupation challenging retail and maybe even tourism is ... the telephone operator.

Here, at any given time, at least a couple of thousand people spend their working hours telling people from, say, Canton, Ohio, how to use their new can openers, or asking distant voters their opinion of Congress or defining the amorphous difference between software and hardware problems to neophyte computer users in remote corners of the country. They handle payroll for hundreds of thousands of people. They pay insurance claims. They take orders. They service.

In the past decade, Southwest Florida has been carving a national niche as the location of choice for the complex, centralized, communication-dependent service industry known as call centers. Blue chip industries and storefront independents alike have anointed this geography as, well, The Center of All Centers.

Not counting the "quality of life" euphemism for "nice weather," there are three rationales for the proliferation of call centers in Lee County. They are wanted by government and business alike; there is special supporting technical infrastructure; and surprisingly, in a market presumed to have a shallow labor pool, the workforce is perfectly suited.

Workin' In A Call Mine

"The labor market is wonderful," says Jim Helms, human resources manager of the SONY Electronics Inc. Customer Information Service Center.

Jane Moore, human resources manager for GE's Client Business Services Inc., agrees, calling Southwest Florida "...a strong labor market."

"There are three primary reasons for selecting Southwest Florida, and Fort Myers specifically," quips Peter Cole, national director of LYNX PPG's Customer Service Centers, which processes insurance claims. "Number One is available labor force. Second is labor force. Third is labor force."

In a land where help wanted signs are found as frequently as fast food franchises, the thought of finding available, affordable, trained people seems to fly in the face of common sense. But Pete Winton, research director for Lee County's Economic Development Office, understands why Fort Myers workers suit the needs of call centers. It's attitude. "We have a good work force to fill their worker demands," he says. "Our economy is 30 percent in service and 25 percent in retail, and [workers] have developed good customer service skills."

He explains that call centers handle issues about which customers may be sensitive, from programming stubborn VCRs to filing claims for broken windshields. This handling requires finesse, the same kind of finesse one hopes to find in quality waiters, store clerks and hotel staff. LYNX's Cole says that these employees collectively are the factor that "makes or breaks all call centers."

SRBI (Schulman, Ronca, & Bucuvalas, Inc.), a New York-based public opinion polling business, researched more than 30 markets before locating a branch here 2 1/2 years ago, according to Bob Vojinovic, vice president and director of operations. "The quality of the interview is important," he explains. "Therefore, we are constantly seeking interviewers with exceptional voice clarity, reading skills and retention skills."

Yet while Southwest Florida has plenty of these people, many willing to forsake the seasonality of retail and tourism for the steady pay and healthy benefits of year-round work, not every call center is equally successful in finding them.

"To me the biggest problem we have in Southwest Florida is the labor," says Mike DeMas of Bonita's INTERCEPT of Florida Inc. "I think [call centers] are crazy to open here." His company is an inbound telemarketing call center that receives orders for merchandise and handles off-hours calls for businesses. In his three-and-a-half years here, he has grown his business to employ 30 people and through aggressive Internet marketing is continuing to grow rapidly. "It's very difficult for me to recruit and hire people," he says. "I feel I have competitive wages and benefits."

Compensation is a critical issue. SONY's Helms says, "We're one of the premier employers. The test for all that is not so much the numbers, it's the demographics." Of SONY's 600 local employees, nearly one-fourth are professional-level positions that handle escalated issues, according to Helms. He says the attraction for labor is due to the fact that positions at that level are uncommon in the hospitality industry. Additionally, he says his employees are in a 50-50 ratio of males-to-females, nearly half are college degreed, and most are primary wage earners. "None of this would be true," he says, "if we were not offering our excellent benefit package."

At Operators Standing By, an inbound local answering service, general manager Sharon Baker is holding her own in the labor market. "I'm not fighting tooth and nail," she says of keeping her 13 people. "My turnover is fairly low."

But although she agrees with the customer-oriented nature of the labor pool, Baker decries the lack of training. "Only about one out of 100 are trained," she says. "On a scale of 1 to 10," Baker postulates, rating the overall labor market here, "I'd give it a six."

Untrained but with the right customer attitude, applicants who switch from retail and tourism can do OK. GE's Moore pays entry-level wages typical for call centers here. "We are a market-based pay structure," she says. "For someone in a call-taking position, we pay $18,000 to $23,000 a year." Add in the comprehensive benefits package, and entry-level compensation may range from $22,500 to more than $28,000 a year. Factor in the higher salaries paid to supervisors and decision makers, and the average creeps higher. These are the very wages that Lee County's Economic Development Office strives for.

"The number [we look for] is $25,728, based on an average Lee County wage of $22,372," says Winton. His office's objective is to increase Lee County's average compensation (wages and benefits) by 15 percent. To this end, he offers companies cash, $2000 per job, up to $200,000 total, for creating new positions that meet the 115 percent-of-average criterion. There are other criteria -- for example, half or more of the company's business must be outside of Lee County, and 20 new jobs (10 in an enterprise zone) must be created -- but the offer extends to new companies as well as established ones.

Getting Enough Fiber

The other basic need of call centers is fast, reliable communications. Revenues rise and fall in direct proportion, and costs in inverse proportion, to call volume. Markets that get call centers are those that recognize this fact and have built to support it. "Some of the call centers cannot go down for a second with a communication blip," says Winton. "Our area has a g