March 28, 2024
Business

Call center coming to Pittsfield

PITTSFIELD – Global Contact Services of North Carolina announced Tuesday that it will open a new call center in Pittsfield, creating at least 200 new jobs by early March. The Pittsfield location will be the 11th call center for GCS.

The move softens the loss of 145 local jobs announced Monday by San Antonio Shoe and six teaching positions that will be lost in June with the closure of St. Agnes Catholic School.

Pittsfield Town Manager Kathryn Ruth said that enticing the company to Pittsfield was an intense process that took a combination of town, state and regional resources.

“We are very, very pleased,” Ruth said.

“This is welcome news in a community that is going through unanticipated job losses with the announced closure of the SAS shoe manufacturing facility,” U.S. Sen. Susan Collins commented after the announcement. “I assured [GCS president Greg] Alcorn that his company will find terrific, hardworking employees in the area who are eager to help his business deliver the very best customer service.” Collins’ office had been working with state and local officials for several months to bring GCS to Pittsfield.

GCS provides telephone communications services to major national corporations in the fields of insurance, finance, telecommunications and politics, and Pittsfield was competing against three other communities – all outside of Maine – for the center.

“We are delighted in our choice,” Bob Lynch, GCS director of expansion, said from his Virginia office Tuesday. “It is a win-win situation.”

Lynch said there were “a lot of pluses in locating in Pittsfield. We liked the community, there were [a] lot of available insurance agents, the labor pool was great, and we liked the building.”

Now that GCS has made its decision, company officials aren’t wasting any time in converting the former ICT call center in Somerset Plaza. “We expect to be up and running by the 5th of March,” Lynch said. “In two or three weeks, we’ll be up there conducting interviews and hiring.”

He said many of the people who turned out for a recent job fair were extremely well-qualified and that the company will begin with about 30 workers and quickly build to two 100-employee shifts.

Lynch said all the jobs would be full-time and offer a generous benefit package.

At the two-day job fair earlier this month, almost 900 people applied for the jobs, including many who filed applications online.

GCS is a leading provider of integrated customer care solutions for major corporations throughout the U.S. It has corporate offices in Salisbury, N.C., and operating headquarters in Mount Hope, W.Va. GCS has a presence in seven states, including North Carolina, West Virginia, Virginia, Ohio, Florida, Texas and Arizona and has a total work force of more than 1,500. GCS clients include Fortune 100 companies such as AIG, Bank of America, Valero, JP Morgan Chase, Verizon, Wells Fargo, Wachovia, American Express, Washington Mutual and HSBC.

Meanwhile, Ruth said the town and state are planning a strategic response to the SAS closing. Since the company said it would spread out the layoffs from now until April, Ruth said it was advantageous to have some time to explore retraining options.

The company has offered its employees generous severance packages, she said, which include one week’s pay for each year worked. “Everyone will get a minimum of six weeks’ pay,” she said.

Ruth said Gov. John Baldacci called on Monday when he learned of the SAS closure and promised state support for the workers.

“The good thing is that Pittsfield has a very diverse economic base,” she said. “This can help those employees find new jobs.”

bdnpittsfield@verizon.net

487-3187


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