Sitel plans to open a third contact center in Sweden to serve the Scandinavian market for clients such as Microsoft, Ace Insurance, Hotel Express and Swissair/Sabena.
The center will be located in Eskilstuna, about an hour west of Stockholm “in one of the most densely populated areas of Sweden,” said Sitel spokesman Bill Sims in Baltimore.
It will employ 50 people initially, bringing Sitel's Swedish work force to 330. Sims said the new site would add more employees later on. “We simply outgrew our locations and needed more space,” he said.
The company's major center is located in Orebro, a town in northern Sweden where its Scandinavian headquarters are located. The work force there has doubled over the past two years, and no additional space was available. Sitel also has a satellite office in Stockholm.
Sims said the Invest in Sweden Agency helped Sitel find the new location.
“We're using Sweden as a hub for all the Scandinavian countries because you can find all the Scandinavian languages you need to operate a call and contact center effectively,” he said. “We actually have people who speak Scandinavian languages in our much larger UK facilities, but the best place to be is right in the heart of Scandinavia where we are adding new business all the time.”
Sitel's facilities, like other international call center companies, have morphed into contact centers able to handle voice and text.
“We deal with fax and e-mails and do proactive and reactive chats on the Internet,” Sims said.
Sitel does not plan to expand the Scandinavian site into a center for doing business across the Gulf of Finland in the Baltic countries, northeastern Poland and Russia's St. Petersburg region.
A number of other contact and marketing companies have considered that possibility as the Baltic economies expand and Russia recovers.
