COMMENTARY
Summit Communications
Enters the Call Center Arena
By Rob Kay and Jeff Bloom
Over
the past two years Tim Bajarin, one of the top analysts in Silicon Valley, has come to
Hawaii advocating that our state focus on developing call centers as an industry. He understood that Hawaii may not have the
infrastructure to support full bore Silicon Valley companies but we surely did have a
chance to grow a call center sector which didn’t demand the kind of high powered
engineers that software companies or manufacturing facilities depend upon.
Why was Bajarin so bullish on call centers? What
Hawaii didn’t have in engineers we made up in the way of multilingual operators and
support personnel. Our state also enjoys a
time zone that allows us to do business in Asia and the
mainland in the same working
day, great fiber optic connections and a good system of community colleges and private
technical schools.
To date, a few call centers have successfully set up operations on Oahu and the Big
Island.
|
One
of the most interesting companies to do so is
Summit Communications,
a 40-person operation that got its start at the Manoa Innovation Center but will soon move
to a 4000 square foot office at 1132 Bishop Street. A
telecommunications company, Summit originally based its business on setting up shared
tenant services for office buildings and hotels. Shared tenant services become possible
after the state deregulated the telecommunications industry. This allowed smaller telecom
to provide and aggregate telephone services, Internet access, long distance calling and
other traditional telecommunications services in large buildings.
Recently Summit has gotten into the call center business in a big way. Early this year
they won a bid to provide a call center that would field all calls for the Hawaii Visitor’s
and Convention Bureau. The three year
contract will be worth about $400,000 a year to Summit and will entail hiring an
additional 15 operators and supervisory personnel. The
jobs will pay anywhere from $10-13 per hour, which translates as about $25,000 to $28,000
per year.
Oddly enough, currently the call center for the HVCB is located in Arizona. However, the
powers that be decided it was time to inject a little more Aloha spirit into the tourism
promotion business by utilizing local people and wisely decided to move the operation back
to the Islands. Multi-lingual operators would
be employed with fluency in German, Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean and French. The new call center will be web-enabled and have
the latest technologies in place such as “click to talk” capabilities. That means that a web surfer looking at the HVCB
site need only click an icon to speak with an operator. |
Summit
Communications’ General Manager, Chad Johnston, told us that the company is not a
newcomer to call centers. “We’ve
been providing telecommunications services to Physicians Exchange, a doctor’s call
center here in Honolulu since 1998,” said Johnston, so we have experience supporting
mission critical operations.”
He explained that the personnel at the new call center (which would operate on a 7/24
basis) would not solely depend on the HVCB for its business. Summit aims to get contracts
with other Island Visitors Bureaus and expand into other areas as well.
“We see growing an entire business out of this,” said Johnston. He told us there were a number of local business
that might use a call center including, internet service providers, Lawyers referral
services, physicians, retail outlets, restaurants and hotels and other specialty niche
services. For example call center operators
might be used as virtual concierges or virtual secretaries for consultants or one-person
businesses. Call center personnel also might
be used to conduct surveys or for special events. Johnston explained that call centers are
often used to handle “overflow” phone calls from concerts or activities such as
the Honolulu Marathon.
Summit is proving something that we’ve believed in all along.
You don’t need super high tech companies to build our economy and provide meaningful
employment. By making our state more business and technology friendly we can grow or
tattered economy. However, without prior deregulation of the state’s
telecommunications industry, Summit would never have had the opportunity to expand and
eventually branch out into the call center arena.
The key in our estimation is for local companies to leverage available technologies
and enter niches that the larger, stodgier companies would hesitate to attempt. This is
exactly what Summit has done and we wish them the best of luck. |
