Outbound Call Center Featured Article

Delta To Shut Down Contact Center in Jamaica; Bring Jobs to U.S.

By Tracey E. Schelmetic
TMCnet Contributor

In a sign that American consumers' preference for U.S. based contact center agents may be penetrating, Delta today became the latest airline to say it will bring call center jobs back to the U.S., according to TheStreet .

Delta Cargo, which currently uses a contract (third-party) call center in Montego Bay, Jamaica that handles calls about the shipments of animals, will close this contact center shortly, CEO Richard Anderson said yesterday, on a recorded message for employees.

“One of the ways to mitigate the impact of the recession is to insource work,” Anderson said.

“It provides job protection and it is consistent with what the administration wants companies to do in the U.S. today, which is to bring back work from overseas and do our best to increase employment.”

(It's interesting that the reason for bringing call centers back into the U.S. was cited as “to mitigate the impact of the recession,” when companies initially began outsourcing contact centers to save money in the first place.)

For Delta, 40 agents working for an independent contact center in Jamaica had been taking Delta's animal-transport related calls at the MBJ call center in Montego Bay, but Delta plans to begin “cross-training” employees in Atlanta and Minneapolis to handle the work, Delta said. Delta has nine U.S. contact centers and, on rare occasions, outsources calls to Cape Town, South Africa, Montego Bay and Santiago, Chile, a spokeswoman said.

In 2009, Delta closed a reservations call center in India. In a telephone message to employees at that time, CEO Richard Anderson, “The customer acceptance of call centers in foreign countries is low, and our customers are not shy about letting us have that feedback.”

Delta's not the only airline to get the message about Americans being fed up with foreign contact centers. Last week, TheStreet reported that US Airways will close a passenger call center in Manila, Philippines later this year.

United, the only other airline to use an offshore contact center for U.S. domestic, English-language calls, has centers in seven cities including Manila; Delhi, India and Pune, India. United's reservations agents, who are represented by the International Association of Machinists, are currently involved in contract talks. Will United close even more foreign contact centers?

“It is not unreasonable to assume that returning the offshore jobs to the U.S. is a subject for negotiation,” noted TheStreet.