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US Call-Center Jobs — That Pay $100K a Year
bheer writes "BusinessWeek profiles a call center company called iQor which has grown revenues 40% year-on-year by (shock) treating employees as critical assets. It's done this not by nickel-and-diming, but by expanding its US operations (13 centers across the US now), giving employees universal health insurance, and paying salaries and bonuses that are nearly 50% above industry norms. The article notes that outsourcing will continue and globalization will continue to change the world's economic landscape. 'But the US is hardly helpless. With smart processes and the proper incentives, US companies can keep jobs here in America, and do so in a way that is actually better for the company and its employees.' Now if only other companies get a clue as well."
A phrase I saw in the summary almost had me sending a note to timothy from the "See any serious problems with this story? Email our on-duty editor" link, then when I RTFA I saw that it was word for word from TFA: "IQor also gives its U.S. employees universal health insurance".
A meaningless phrase, I think. The words "health insurance" suffices; universal health insurance is what Canadian and European residents get from their government. Bad writing at the least, which lead me to suspect that there were bad facts as well. However, most of the rest of it seemed well written.
Sure, some companies, such as Dell (DELL), have moved call centers back home after customer protests.
Makes it look like the customers are protesting outsourcing, when in fact what pisses most people off is that the offshore phone monkeys are completely unintelligible. If you're handling calls from Mexican customers, your call center workers should be able to speak fluent Spanish, not bad Spanish like I speak.
The best of iQor's front-line call-center workers make more than $100,000 per year.
What's the starting wage? TFA doesn't say.
And unlike many of its competitors, and an increasing number of other U.S. companies, iQor offers all its employees good health insurance and generous benefits packages.
Some time in the early 1980s, the head of one of the airlines (that ironically became a union airline later) said "any company that gets a union deserves one". Treat your employees like shit, and they will treat your customers like shit, and may even organize a union.
IQor also invests in technology designed to make its employees more efficient
Gad, there's little I hate worse than robocallers. When I say "hello" you better echo my "hello" PDQ or I'm hanging the phone up. You called me; don't put me on hold as soon as I answer without even responding.
From TFS: But the US is hardly helpless. With smart processes and the proper incentives, U.S. companies can keep jobs here in America, and do so in a way that is actually better for the company and its employees.
That assumes that today's busiesspeople aren't so greedy and stupid that they're like the monkey who has his hand stuck in the jar, too stupidly greedy to let go of the treat inside. A pretty unwarranted assumption, I think.
Free Martian Whores!
The CEO of this company was born in India!
I think it says something very nasty about U.S. corporate culture that it takes an immigrant the see value in hiring Americans.
What does this have to do with Sarah Palin?
An MBA is like a pilot's license where they only trained you to fly into the ground. With your grade being based on how quickly you can get to the ground.
What industry finds call center work so valuable that they can pay iQor enough to pay its employees so well?
Pretty much all of them. The only difference with iQor is that they are focusing their cashflow in a different way than the traditional model.
They are paying the people who directly create wealth instead of the risk managers who indirectly create wealth. Given that risk management (capital management, the executives) is becoming a rather boring and formulaic specialty, and that we recently proved that the "best" really aren't that much better at it (the bank collapse was a direct result of poor risk management), it seems reasonable to shift cashflow toward paying the direct creators of wealth and to get by with more state school BABMs and fewer Columbia MBAs.
Over the past 40 years in particular we shifted to the point of paying risk managers compensatory wages that exceed their wealth creation, while paying labor competitive wages that are vastly below their wealth creation. Perhaps that made sense when capital/risk management was a new, complex, and poorly understood science. What this company seems to be positing, and something with which I agree, is that capital/risk management is becoming formulaic, and so now a portion of the risk management compensation cashflow can be efficiently repurposed toward improving the quality of the product (hiring better communicators in this case).
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