Teletech officially closes call centre

Teletech has officially closed its Sudbury call centre and laid off its remaining employees, who worked out of the Rainbow Centre Mall.

Jeanna Blatt, a TeleTech spokesperson, confirmed the company officially closed its doors Oct. 16. However, she said the company will continue to pay rent on its mall space until the lease expires in January 2013.

The company announced July 23 it was closing its local office, putting 218 people out of work. When TeleTech opened in Sudbury in 1999, they employed as many as 750 people, offering relatively high-paying jobs with benefits for a city that desperately needed them.

At the time, Sudbury's jobless rate was at 10.2 per cent, compared with the Ontario’s average of 6.4 per cent. And the dollar was below 70 cents US. 

Today, the city’s jobless rate is below seven per cent and the dollar is at par with the greenback. Both factors spelled doom for certain types of call centres – or contact centres, as people in the industry call them.

However, there are still more than 1,000 people working in contact centres in Greater Sudbury. But those centres rely on an educated, bilingual workforce, rather than on factors such as a low dollar.