Oklahoma drawing call centers

Saturday, July 30th 2005, 9:20 pm

By: News On 6

TULSA, Okla. (AP) _ Wrestling with the odd accent or funny-sounding word choice of the person on the other end of the line has become one of the hallmarks of the late-night call to customer service or the mid-afternoon check on product delivery.

Increasingly, however, that accent coming through the receiver isn't the clipped phrasing from Bangalore, India, but an Okie drawl from Tulsa or Oklahoma City.

With its low-cost of living, commensurate low wages and central United States location, Oklahoma has found itself as a new draw for call center business. While customer service centers and sales development offices have grown in less-developed, English-speaking nations, similar businesses are taking off in Oklahoma.

``I really wish we had done something to draw them here,'' said Charles Kimbrough, director of business recruiting for the Oklahoma Department of Commerce. ``But the industry found us.''

America Online, Dell Inc., DirecTV and Southwest Airlines are among the companies that have placed call centers around the world and in Oklahoma. These four are among the employers who have added hundreds of call center jobs in the past three years.

Currently, there are at least 85 centers in the state employing more than 40,000. The centers cluster around the two large metro areas, but some companies, like Mutual of Omaha that employs 600 processing claims in Woodward, a town of 12,000 in northwestern Oklahoma, look to rural areas, Kimbrough said.

Growth here is part of a trend in putting call centers into the Southwest and the domestic success of the industry, said Richard Feinberg, a professor of consumer science at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.

``You have an educated population, a little higher unemployment and lower wages. It's a perfect storm of reasons to locate a call center in the state,'' said Feinberg, director of Purdue's Center for Customer Driven Quality. ``States like Oklahoma and Arizona have gotten very aggressive in developing call centers.''

In Arizona, the Phoenix area has drawn call centers by taking advantage of educated retirees wanting to work a few days per week, Feinberg said. A similar model has been used in developing the industry in Florida, he said. The only limiting factor in any state seems to be success -- as the economy improves it becomes increasingly more expensive to add call center jobs, Feinberg said.

The Phoenix metropolitan area, whose population of 3.6 million is slightly more than the state of Oklahoma, has more than 250 call centers employing more than 125,000 people, according to a survey by the Greater Phoenix Economic Council and the Arizona chapter of the Call Center Networking Group.

Across the country, there is no actual good count of the number of call centers, said David L. Butler, executive director of the National Association of Call Centers. The U.S. Census Bureau has attempted to get a handle on the industry, but its total of 5,500 centers is well below the mark, Butler said.

Butler, who has studied the industry for the past decade as the director of the Call Center Research Laboratory at the University of Southern Mississippi, said there is no one logical system that drives the growth of call centers. Phoenix, Albuquerque, N.M., Oklahoma City and Tampa, Fla., developed call center businesses in part through working to pull in companies, part critical mass of having centers and in part luck, he said.

``There is no one reason,'' Butler said. ``Right now, people don't know where to place their bets. There's growth going on domestically and overseas.''

Butler boiled the requirements for call center growth down to three components: a ready labor force, a skilled labor force and the presence of economic incentives for equipment installation or training. That combination has made Oklahoma No. 1 in per capital call center growth between 2002 and 2005, according to Butler's research.

``The one thing you can say is that this is a total growth industry,'' Butler said. ``It is growing, and there are some states and some nations that are doing better than others.''

Domestic growth, particularly in places like Oklahoma, counters a popular notion that call center jobs are moving overseas, Purdue's Feinberg said. No more than 5 percent of call centers are operating offshore, Feinberg said. There are significant limitations on personnel, English ability and time zone changes that make it unlikely for overseas locations to claim more call center business, he said.

Plus, ``the savings difference is decreasing,'' Feinberg said. ``Pretty soon, those jobs start coming back.''

What they found in Oklahoma was a great work force, said Michele Blood of Dell.

``They have the customer service skills, the soft skills, that we are looking for,'' Blood said. ``They work well in teams.''

As a company with customers worldwide and a reputation for customer service, the Oklahoma center has been a good fit for Dell, Blood said. The Dell center opened in Oklahoma City one year ago with plans to employ 500. Currently, Dell employs 700 and announced this month that it would add another 300 jobs in the next year.

``Nine or 10 years ago, we started out as a low-cost alternative for call centers,'' Kimbrough said. ``We're not going to beat Indian or Filipino wages, but we're competitive and we are lower cost that the East or the West Coast.

``Plus we have the benefit of time. Add an hour to either end of the working day and we can serve people in New York or L.A.''

While the Okie drawl produces ``y'all'' in the ``How y'all doin'?'' and may stump a few listeners, it's not a harsh dialect, Kimbrough said.

``You can teach people which button to push, but you can't teach them friendliness,'' Kimbrough said. ``We have a lot of people who like to get on the phone and be friendly.''