CALL CENTERS Despite do-not-call registry phone workers are still busy

Close to 3,000 Mahoning and Shenango workers earn a living on the phone.
By CYNTHIA VINARSKY
VINDICATOR BUSINESS WRITER
Call centers continue to rank among the largest employers in the Mahoning and Shenango valleys, despite the recent roll-out of the much-publicized national do-not-call registry.
But if you're picturing an army of stereotypical telemarketers waiting to interrupt dinner with a sales pitch, think again.
Most of the region's phone jobs have stayed because they focus on incoming calls, not the outgoing telemarketing calls regulated by the do-not-call legislation.
Liberty Mutual Insurance, for example, has 460 employees handling customer service and property damage claims at its call center in New Castle, Pa.
When an auto policy holder wants to add coverage for a new car, for example, the call is routed to the New Castle center. Calls from customers reporting auto accidents or property damage also go to the claims department there.
Glenn Greenberg, a Liberty Mutual spokesman in Boston, said the operation is one of four customer service and claims centers the company operates.
Others are in Mishawaka, Ind., and in Phoenix and Scottsdale, Ariz.
Cellular One call center workers in Boardman also focus mainly on incoming calls from the telecommunications company's customers in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and New York.
Craig Davis, a Cellular One spokesman, said workers do some limited outbound telemarketing calls, but only to Cellular One customers.
Do-not-call registry restrictions do not apply to a company's customers.
With 250 full- and part-time employees, the Boardman location is one of five Cellular One centers in the country, Davis said.
Providing assistance
Workers at the AT & amp;T National Relay Center in New Castle service a special customer base -- deaf and hearing impaired callers who need assistance to make a call.
Robert Cruz, an AT & amp;T spokesman, said the center is one of the company's largest, and it added more than 30 new positions last year, bringing its work force to 226.
InfoCision Management is one of the region's biggest call center employers with 900 workers at locations in Boardman, Austintown and New Castle.
InfoCision does some telemarketing, but most of its work is in fund raising and volunteer recruitment for charitable, religious and political organizations -- categories not affected by the do-not-call legislation.
About 85 percent of InfoCision's calls are outbound, said Steve Brubaker, senior vice president of operations, but the company's biggest growth area is inbound, customer service type calls.
Brubaker said InfoCision has invested millions of dollars in technology to comply with the new federal telemarketing regulations.
Its goal, he said, is to equip its own telemarketing departments and to market its expertise to other companies that might consider outsourcing its telemarketing and customer service work.
"The do-not-call legislation can really be an advantage for us because we specialize in being a partner with companies," he said. "We can take over their calling, save them all the headaches and reduce their internal costs."
Telemarketing
Reese Teleservices, with 180 workers at a New Castle center, and EBSCO TeleService, with between 50 and 60 workers in Boardman, are both telemarketing companies.
EBSCO calls current subscribers of medical directories, trade magazines and other publications to sign up renewals, said spokesman Bob Prosise.
"The do-not-call list has a very minimal impact on our work," he said.
Susan Burgess, a Reese spokeswoman, said that company's telemarketing business has grown, even in the wake of the new call legislation, because it emphasizes quality and results.
"When there is a finite pool of business, you have to be sure you have the best people," she said. "We hope to flourish and grow in the new landscape."
The MCI call center in Niles now employs 800, said spokeswoman Audrey Waters, dividing their duties between inbound customer service and outbound telemarketing calls. Employment at the center has been as high as 1,100. Waters said MCI is hiring for both customer service and telemarketing positions.
Closed
Three companies shut down their call centers in the area last year, eliminating more than 500 full- and part-time phone jobs, but none mentioned the do-not-call registry as a reason for closing.
TNS Intersearch in Liberty, the largest of the shut down centers, left 400 workers jobless when it closed its market research phone center in December.
The Horsham, Pa.-based company said more of its business clients are requesting mail and Internet market research instead of telephone surveying.
Teleperformance, a French-owned telemarketing company, idled about 70 when it closed its call center in Austintown last year.
The company never gave a reason publicly for the closing, but it happened several months before the do-not-call list took effect.
Exterra Credit Recovery left a similar number jobless when the owner filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in April and closed its center in downtown Youngstown.
vinarsky@vindy.com