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Comcast to Bring Back Hundreds of Customer-Service Jobs to New England

Posted on: Monday, 27 December 2004, 09:00 CST

Dec. 24--In an age when calling customer service more and more means talking to a call center in the Midwest or overseas, Comcast Corp. is going against the flow and returning hundreds of customer-service jobs to New England.

During the first quarter of 2005, Comcast expects to add 300 jobs in New England, many of them related to its move to have Comcast employees handle more calls about high-speed Internet service. Most of those calls are now directed to Florida and New Brunswick, Canada.

The 300 positions will be in addition to about 500 Comcast has added over the past year in places like Allston, Chelmsford, Malden, and Manchester, N.H., as it "insourced" cable television and digital phone customer service jobs that the system's previous owner, AT&T Broadband, had scattered to other states.

Two years ago, roughly half of all cable TV service calls were routed out of the state; today, all calls from New England are handled by New England representatives who are part of Comcast's 5,500-person workforce in the area.

"In spite of our size, we really are a very locally run corporation, and we want our customers to have the same feeling that they are dealing with somebody local," said Robin Higgle, director of talent management for Comcast's New England region, covering 2.2 million customers in 343 cities and towns.

Stephen B. Burke, president of Comcast cable, the nation's largest cable and broadband Internet provider, with 20 million customers, tells employees he wants Comcast to feel like 20 one-million-customer companies, not one 20-million-customer behemoth.

The roughly $11 to $14 an hour Comcast pays call-center staff locally is considerably higher than what it would pay in the South or Midwest. But Comcast spokeswoman Jennifer L. Khoury said company executives attribute a 50 percent reduction in customer complaints and a 17 percent increase in customer satisfaction, as measured by surveys, to the return of jobs to Massachusetts. Comcast has also resumed consistently posting net gains in customers, after losing tens of thousands during the last months of AT&T Broadband.

Susan Houston, executive director of the Massachusetts Alliance for Economic Development, an 11-year-old nonprofit agency in Wellesley that aims to promote the state's economy, said she was hard pressed to name another company that had returned customer-service jobs to Massachusetts.

"There must be some sound business reasons for them to do so," Houston said. "They must find it cost-competitive to do so, and there may also be some issues around the ease of training."

Jack Hoey, a spokesman for Verizon Communications Inc., said the phone company will be hiring 3,000 to 5,000 people this coming year to staff a new fiber-optic network Verizon is building in Massachusetts and eight other states. It will deliver high-speed Internet service and a version of pay television to compete with Comcast and other cable companies.

"I can't give you a specific breakout, but Massachusetts will certainly get a healthy share of those positions," Hoey said. Hoey added that, except for technical support for broadband Internet, "We have never outsourced call centers for calls to our business. When you call today from Massachusetts to order service, there's a good chance that you're talking to someone in Andover." Verizon employs 14,600 people statewide.

Tony Whelan recently became Comcast's customer-care supervisor for high-speed Internet service, working out of Malden. He said Comcast has been pleased with the work of its agents in New Brunswick and will continue to direct calls there about some of the most complex problems.

But, Whelan said, bringing more service calls in-house "is helping on all levels. It's very common that people calling also have a question about video or telephony. Also, 'Where are you located?' is a pretty common customer question, and customers seem to really appreciate when the answer is Malden or Allston."

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CMCSK, VZ,

Source: The Boston Globe

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