'Reverse' call center outsourcing -- driven by broadband -- could create 100,000 U.S. jobs

A new coalition of contact center companies calling itself jobs4america has set a goal of creating 100,000 new jobs in the U.S. over the next two years—and the group today received strong praise from FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, who was on hand for an announcement of the coalition in Jeffersonville, Ind.

The event took place at a new facility operated by coalition member Accent Marketing Services that aims to employ 2000 new workers, including 175 near-term jobs. The coalition envisions that many of the new jobs it aims to create could be done from workers’ homes—provided that the home has broadband connectivity.

Jobs4america objectives could not be achieved without broadband, said Genachowski. “This center will power three or four times as many people working in their homes,” he explained. “It will do more than empower them to take calls and read a script. They will be able to process transactions [and] almost all of their operations will rely on high-speed Internet. If you unplugged this facility from broadband, you wouldn’t have it. [The coalition is] making homes virtual service centers as long as the homes are connected to broadband.”

The strategy envisioned by the jobs4america coalition is quite similar to that of LiveOps, a company that uses cloud computing to enable call center contract workers to work from home, and which has had significant success with a grass roots training program organized by community leaders in Perry County, Tennessee (CP: Cloud-based call center provider is key employer in rural Tennessee).

Using home-based workers benefits companies that rely on call centers because there is less overhead, said Genachowski. And although that approach involves some business risks, Genachowski said he was “glad to see opportunities for people who can only work if they are working at home.”
In recent years, many of those jobs would have been shipped out of the countries to call centers around the world.

Members of the jobs4america coalition include Sprint Nextel and the non-profit American Teleservices Association, as well as 10 companies involved in the call center industry. According to a jobs4america fact sheet, member companies and organizations represent thousands of contact centers employing millions of Americans.

The coalition expects that about 17,000 of the jobs it will create will be work-from-home jobs. According to the coalition, those jobs can help eliminate an estimated 47 million vehicle miles traveled, which could save 2.3 million gallons of gas and prevent the release of nearly 22,000 tons of greenhouse gases.