By Bridget Carey
bcarey@MiamiHerald.com
Need to contact customer service? These days, you’re as likely to get Indiana on the line as India.
U.S. companies have been slowly shifting call centers back to America from overseas, say analysts. Plantation-based Customer Contact Channels, or C3 for short, is responding by adding 7,000 employees and hopes to add a call center in South Florida within a year.
The year-old C3 has the background for the job. It was founded and is run by former leaders of Plantation-based Precision Response Corp., a call-response operation that once employed 13,000. PRC co-founder David Epstein sold the company in 2000 for $705 million.
The serial entrepreneur has since kept busy with projects including the Florida Panthers (he’s a part-owner), private venture capital firm Presidential Capital Partners (which he co-founded) and PetStyle.com (which he also co-founded.)
Last year, Epstein returned to the customer service game as co-chief executive of C3.
The twist: C3 doesn’t just respond on the line. Customer problems are now online as well, via chat and through social media.
“The ways we communicate today are significantly different than 10 years ago,” Epstein said. “Facebook, Twitter ... we can help our clients monitor what is going on.”
C3’s approach keeps all customer communication together, where it can be tracked and acted on quickly, with one similarly trained team. That’s a shift from current practice; according to a recent survey by Harris Interactive of large public companies, most assigned social media response to marketing and public relations departments rather than customer service.
“There’s a big question now on who handles it. Is it marketing? Customer service? Public relations? That is something companies are wrestling with,” said Emily Yellin, customer service consultant and author of Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us. “Ultimately, it doesn’t matter to the customer. It just needs to be handled consistently.”
At the same time, companies are shifting their attitudes toward overseas customer service. In the past decade, clients hoped to save money by outsourcing to call centers in the Philippines and India, where costs may be a third less than in the United States.
“There was a drifting away of customer service as a value added,” said Richard “Rick” Ferry, C3 president, a former executive vice president at PRC.
But cultural and language barriers long have prompted customer complaints — leading some companies to focus on the long-term costs in customer loyalty.
“The needle is moving back in the positive direction,” Epstein said. “That’s what got me excited about getting back into the business. You could feel it. There was a vibe.”
Since opening its first call center in Twin Falls, Idaho, in June of last year, C3 has expanded to Utah, Arizona, Texas and Ohio. It also has an overseas footprint for companies less concerned about cultural clashes, and has operations in India, Philippines, China, Bulgaria, Scotland, Costa Rica, Colombia and Puerto Rico, with a total of 14 call centers.
C3 plans to hire 2,600 more employees company-wide in the next 45 days, bringing the total number of employees to 7,000, with 4,500 in the U.S. They will service contracts with 10 firms in insurance, healthcare, telecommunications and technology. C3 executives would not reveal client names.
Though the executive office in Plantation has 52 employees, none of the call centers are located in South Florida. Within a year, C3 plans to open in the Panhandle — but the right South Florida deal hasn’t emerged yet, Ferry said.
“The multicultural resources here are tremendous,” Ferry said. “We’re bullish on the South Florida workforce.”
If they house an office here, they’ll be alongside PRC, now owned by Alorica, with a current South Florida workforce of 2,000 in three call centers.
