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Amazon Plans to Close Most of Its Physical Call Centers
How do you cut costs when you have giant call centers dedicated to customer support? If you’re mega-retailer Amazon, you send your call center agents home.
According to a Bloomberg report, Amazon is encouraging customer support personnel at some of the company’s large call centers to work from home. It’s a ramp-up of the company’s work-from-home policy to save on capital expenditures for office space. Bloomberg (News - Alert) sources indicated that Amazon plans to shutter all but one of its customer support call centers.
“We’re offering additional members of our Customer Service team the increased flexibility that comes with working virtually,” Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser told Bloomberg. “We’re working with employees to make sure their transition is seamless while continuing to prioritize best-in-class support for customers.”
Amazon currently has call centers in locations such as Grand Forks, North Dakota; Huntington, West Virginia; Kennewick, Washington; and Winchester, Kentucky. Each of these sites employs thousands of workers.
In addition to saving on real estate, the company – the second largest private employer in the United States after Walmart – hopes that by offering remote call center jobs, it will have more extensive labor pools across the country to tap, and it may help reduce turnover in these jobs. Additionally, nascent labor movements targeting Amazon may be causing the company to reevaluate how it treats employees, according to Sophie Mellor writing for Fortune.
“One reason that Amazon may be more inclined to give concessions to its employees is that it is facing increasing employee activism and union drives across its warehouses in the U.S.,” wrote Mellor. “Amazon recently lost its attempt to overturn a historic union election held last April, where workers at a Staten Island, N.Y., warehouse voted to unionize — making the 8,000-employee Amazon facility the first to do so. Another union vote is scheduled at a facility in Albany, N.Y., next month.”
Unionization aside, Amazon certainly isn’t alone in expanding its remote work programs. It’s been a trend across industries that was already emerging and then accelerated by the pandemic. Now, it’s clear that flexible working (remote or hybrid) is going to stick with a majority of companies in some fashion.
For Amazon, there’s another factor that make this a logical move, beyond reducing overhead costs and increasing employee satisfaction. It launched its own CCaaS offering back in 2017 – the same solution it uses in its own contact centers. Since then, it has continued to enhance its commercial product with new features for the contact center market, and this is an opportunity for it to showcase the power of a cloud contact center solution.
Edited by Erik Linask
