2,500 Data-entry Jobs for Ghana

The Shooster family of Margate is known for cutting-edge practices in business, adopting the latest technologies and reaching out to the hearing-impaired to build their telecom center that handles phone calls, e-mails and other tasks for some of the world's largest corporations. Now, the family that grew their 28-year-old company to employ 500 people in South Florida is taking their innovations overseas -- developing a call center in India and a data-entry venture in West Africa's Ghana to grow amid tough global competition.

Frank Shooster, chief legal officer at Global Response Corp., formerly Communication Service Centers, said plans call for opening a 500-seat call center in India's Gujarat province and a minimum 500-seat data-entry center in Ghana early next year, each with a local partner from that nation. The Ghana operation could grow to as many as 2,500 workstations within two years. "Because of advances of telecommunications, it now becomes possible for calls to be handled in India, Africa and almost any place in the world," said Shooster, explaining the decision. "And when you factor in the dramatically lower cost of labor, service can be delivered at roughly half the price of what calls can be typically handled in the United States."

The move comes amid a boom in the call-center industry both in the United States and abroad, as corporations recognize the need for closer customer contact and in some cases, see opportunities to handle calls, Internet chats and other tasks in lower-wage sites outside the United States.

India has emerged as a favored locale for international expansion, because the nation of nearly 1 billion residents offers an ample stock of college-educated engineers with strong English skills at a fraction of U.S. salaries. Plantation-based Precision Response Corp. expanded to India early this year, complementing its South Florida operations that employ more than 6,000 people.

Yet globalization has its costs, too.

Computer giant Hewlett-Packard Co. prompted controversy this summer, when it shifted some call-center work from The Answer Group of North Lauderdale to lower-cost India, putting as many as 1,200 Broward County jobs at risk.

For Global Response, expansion abroad will strengthen South Florida operations, not displace them, Shooster said. Centers overseas will require back-up services in Florida. Plus, the blended cost of U.S. and offshore services will boost competitiveness, helping preserve higher-cost jobs in Margate. He said, "American call centers are going to have to modify their course of action, if they are going to survive in the long-term," said Shooster pragmatically. "We have to evolve from high-school graduates doing basic work to college graduates and Ph.D.s handling specialized work." He emphasized, "It's not just because of our labor costs but also technology. Voice recognition technology will put lots of people out of jobs in the future," he said. "We have to become a knowledge-based industry, offering employees with advanced degrees who can do work that machines can't do."

Shooster said the family at Global Response -- including his parents, Herman and Dorothy, who founded the business, his two brothers, a sister and their spouses -- recognized there was little option but to grow overseas: Clients demand it. Amid a sluggish economy, many big corporations from banks to catalog companies say they can't afford the going U.S. rates for all customer-contact work and request some work be handled abroad -- to cut their expenses at independent call-centers.

Savings abroad can be considerable. To operate a work-station in the United States costs about $26 to $30 an hour, including salary and benefits, rent, administration and other expenses. Operating costs run maybe $12 an hour for the same workstation in India, Shooster said.

Some U.S. call-centers are trying to keep business from moving overseas by cutting outbound-call rates as low as $19 an hour from the United States, but that means "almost no profit," said Shooster. Expansion overseas can be a wiser and more stable option for U.S. call-centers long-term, he said.

Growth overseas means new challenges, however, for economic development groups that promote jobs in South Florida. Call-centers rank as a top employer, with 35,000-plus people working in the industry in the tri-county area. Many development groups now are strengthening ties with universities to improve training for the high-tech jobs of the future, while others are busy recruiting companies overseas, as business gets more mobile elsewhere too. "We're always going to have to compete in a global economy," said Frank Nero, president of Miami-Dade County's Beacon Council.

At Global Response, expansion continues in South Florida, too, Shooster said. The company has added some 100 employees in Margate over the past years and plans to add more on a 32-acre site purchased next to its corporate headquarters -- partly to offer more back-up services for the new overseas operations in India, Africa and possibly soon in Latin America. "In business today," said Shooster, "it's one world -- ready or not."