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Steven Richards and Mabel Rodriguez want to change how the rest of the world views call center work and combat the stereotype that center agents are stuck in low-paying, dead-end jobs.
Richards is CEO and Rodriguez is senior vice president of client services for PRC LLC, which operates a 3-year-old call center for DirecTV in Colorado Springs that employs 400 and plans to add 200 more employees during the next few months. The company operates 18 centers worldwide, with about 9,000 employees, for clients in the consumer products, utilities, financial services, government, health care, insurance, telecommunications, travel and other industries.
Richards joined PRC in 2008 and led the company out of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy that allowed PRC to reduce its debt and aggressively expand last year.
He previously spent four years at Transworld Systems Inc., the largest commercial debt collection company in North America, and another four years as an executive for RMH Teleservices, another call center operator.
Rodriguez heads PRC’s operations for DirecTV and has been with PRC since 1991. Richards and Rodriguez were in Colorado Springs recently to celebrate the third anniversary of the local center’s opening, thank employees there for pledging 1,000 hours of community service this year and announce the center’s hiring plans.
Question: What are the most common sources of PRC new hires?
Richards: Most are coming from other employment opportunities and other sales backgrounds and customer service backgrounds. Some are recent graduates and others are new to the work force.
We also have our fair share of individuals who had been out of work. We look for people with sales experience or some aptitude for sales.
Q: What types of jobs are available?
Richards: These are full-time, long-range positions that include subsidized medical and dental benefits.
The average employee can earn between $30,000 and $40,000 a year if they meet and exceed their goals. We pay a starting wage of $10.50 an hour and you get between $4 and $6 an hour in incentive pay within 90 to 120 days. We are competitive with our benefits: We pay for the lion’s share of medical coverage and reasonable percentage of dental coverage, plus tuition assistance.
Q: What percentage of new hires don’t make it through the training period?
Rodriguez: A certain percentage, about 20 percent, fall out within the first 90 days because it is not a good job fit for them.
Q: Why did you decide to expand this call center?
Rodriguez: Our work for this client is done from four locations, including Colorado Springs, south Florida, North Carolina and Oklahoma.
Some of that work has been redirected to Colorado Springs because the market has been able to support our growth and the quality of the applicant pool here. It makes sense for us to continue to grow our footprint here.
Q: What opportunities for promotion are available?
Rodriguez: We are hiring both call center agents and supervisory/management talent with call center experience across supervisory, training and quality assurance backgrounds. People are unaware of what call centers do.
There is great opportunity for Colorado residents who feel they can be successful doing this. Many never imagined you can make the kind of money with this opportunity that we offer.
Richards: We promote from within — 95 percent of our managers come from within. Ninety percent of our second-level managers and 70 percent of our third-level managers started out as call-center agents.
There is a great opportunity to move from agent to trainer to supervisor to operations manager to site director. Some people get promoted in as little as four or five months.
Q: How big of a threat are off-shore call centers to your U.S. operations?
Richards: We are a growing industry. More Fortune 500 companies are outsourcing to us for our expertise and competency. Customers look for either the highest quality of service or a very competitive price.
The customer has to decide what choice to make as to where it wants calls to be handled. We are seeing more work return to the United States from overseas in the last two or three years to get the quality of service available domestically. — Questions and answers are edited for brevity and clarity. Contact the writer at 636-0234.
How to apply • Go to www.prcnet.com/career.aspx • Apply in person at 6805 Corporate Drive • Call 262-5607 for additional information
Registered: Mar 2008
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