ICT Group plans to open two new contact centers in Canada, bringing the company's number to 10 in the country.
One will be in St. John's, Newfoundland, and will be equipped with 500 workstations. The contact center will be ICT Group's third in the province and will provide both customer sales and service for the company's clients.
The second center will be in Lindsay, Ontario, and will be ICT Group's first in the province. It will have 130 workstations and will complement ICT Group's operations in the Canadian Atlantic region, including a new sales office in Ajax, Ontario. Like the St. John's facility, the Lindsay contact center will perform both customer sales and service for clients.
The Langhorne, PA-based company's Canadian contact centers produce one-third of ICT Group's total production hours.
Network Associates, Santa Clara, CA, a network software development firm, began development of a new branch office in Plano, TX, that will include a customer service and telesales center with the capacity of about 1,100 employees.
The office is to open in the first quarter of 2003. Network Associates, which produces the McAfee, Sniffer and Magic Solutions software brands, is opening the office to replace its existing office in Dallas, where the headcount has doubled to 800 over the past three years.
Telerx, Horsham, PA, said construction has begun on a 40,000-square-foot call center in El Paso, TX, scheduled to open in May.
The center initially will employ 150 customer service agents and 20 support staff. It has the capacity to grow, and Telerx plans eventually to staff it with 300 to 500 telephone agents and 60 support personnel. The El Paso location gives Telerx a presence in the Mountain Time Zone, making it easier to serve clients west of the Mississippi River.
Xentel DM Inc., Calgary, Alberta, has opened a business-to-business call center in Fort Lauderdale, FL, the company's first facility of its kind in the United States.
The new center will solicit small businesses for sponsorships and advertising in entertainment events run by Xentel. Further details about the center were not released. Xentel DM, which produces cause-related entertainment events, draws 21 percent of its sales in Canada and 4 percent of its U.S. sales from BTB marketing.
