FCC Chair Promotes Broadband Contact Center Coalition

Coalition to launch jobs4america, promoting outsourcing to Indiana

By John Eggerton -- Broadcasting & Cable, 8/3/2011 5:05:38 PM

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski is heading to Indiana Thursday to speak at the unveiling of a new contact/call center and the launching of jobs4america, a coalition of contact center companies that says it is trying to tap into broadband to create new jobs in this country.
 
Those are also the companies that outsource such calls offshore, but the goal of the new coalition is to leverage broadband to do more outsourcing to Indiana rather than India. In a release, the FCC billed the coalition as "forward-looking businesses committed to creating thousands of new jobs in America."
 
"Thanks to broadband, a lot of communities in the United States are able to create those jobs all over America now and bring all the options that broadband enables," said coalition spokesperson Nick Lanyi. "It's not just voice anymore, it's e-mail and video and there are a lot of opportunities for folks to do this kind of work from home via VoIP and other technologies."
 
Lanyi said the coalition was driven by the fact that there were skilled Americans out of work and there was broadband spreading across the country. Thursday's launch includes a web site, target for jobs that can be created. He said the coalition asked Genachowski to speak because of his promotion of broadband for job creation.
 
Genachowski is there to applaud the effort, with the FCC having no official role in the new coalition, which includes contact center companies, their lobby American Teleservices Association, and some telecoms -- Sprint/Nextel for one -- said a source.
 
"More and more contact centers are using new broadband technology like VoIP, video conferencing and social networking to improve the customer experience, and a growing number of Americans do call center work from home," said the FCC in promoting the partnership.
 
The new center is in Jeffersonville, Ind., and is being built by jobs4america coalition member Accent Marketing Services.