Call centers can be a signal that a company is having some real success. On the flipside, if a company is having to find a way to keep a contact center open, or even worse if the contact center has to close it can mean that a company is in real trouble.
There are no written rules about the way a company should operate a contact center but there seems to be some unwritten ones. With that in mind, the announcement that Safe Auto Insurance Company is closing their call center in Hemmingway, South Carolina has to be less than a positive sign.
Whether or not this is actually something that should have people nervous is yet to be seen, because the company announced that while it is closing that call center, most of the employees there will be shifted to a contact centers in Ohio or Kentucky. While this move is expected to reduce costs for the company, CEO Ron Davies said that at the moment his firm won’t be reducing head count.
“This decision is about realigning our work force and fully occupying our facilities,” Davies said. “Even as we grew our customer base last year, we found that we were using less than half of our call center capacity and are spread across four buildings in three different states.”
Davies added that this closing really isn’t about the company struggling, but rather an industry that is moving toward the Internet more than physical phone calls. There simply isn’t as much of a need to be having a physical presence in multiple states the way there used to be.
Davies didn’t talk about the number of employees who would be assigned to Kentucky or Ohio.