MONTEGO BAY — Sitel Caribbean, a customer service-based call centre, has hired another 200 people at its Montego Bay Freezone facility, bringing its total number of employees to roughly 600.

The newly hired workers will undergo a six-month training programme and will earn an average of $7,500 a week once training is completed.

“The training wage here is $4,000 a week and the average wage, as of now, for our agents (who have completed training) is somewhere around $7,500,” said CEO of Sitel Caribbean, Patrick Casserly. “We have agents who earn as much as $10,000 and the lowest, I think, is about $6,000. And so I think, we offer very competitive wages.”

According to Casserly, other call centres pay a maximum of $2,000 per week.

“We don’t think that the kind of people we want here can live off that kind of income. We want people who come to work and not have to be concerned about how they’ll pay their bills,” he said.

Despite the government’s initial plan to create 40,000 high end jobs in the IT sector over a five year period, local call centres, such as the scandal-riddled NetServ, have earned a bad reputation for paying low wages and providing unstable working environments.

Technology minister, Phillip Paulwell, said that he had learnt his lesson from the NetServ collapse and pointed to Sitel as the model of what the IT sector should be — slow but steady growth.

Sitel’s Montego Bay operations began with 30 employees almost two years ago with a US$5.3 million investment. Their payroll now stands at about $3 million a week, and according to Casserly, they only do long-term contracts. This, he said, translates into a stable work environment for his employees.

“We don’t do telemarketing, we actually do in-bound customer service or we do inbound mail care and back office processing in its purest sense. Anything that’s in a back office somewhere else in the world, we can transfer it here as long as it’s in English,” Casserly said.

He added that the company recently signed a contract with the second largest insurance company in the United States, and that additional jobs will flow from that agreement. But the Sitel CEO said he was unable to indicate exactly how many jobs would be provided, as negotiations were still underway.

The latest 200-employee boost in the company’s work force stemmed from a new contract signed with the Netherlands-based Royal Philips Electronics, one of the world’s largest electronics companies with sales of Euro 32.3 billion last year.

For the last four years Sitel has handled the roughly 150,000 calls a month to Philips’ customer service lines, but a decision was recently made to move the Texas operations offshore.

According to senior vice president of Philips’ Customer Care Worldwide, Matthijs Vermaas, the move was largely influenced by the working environment at Sitel’s Montego Bay facility.

“Apart from the cost, my main worry is always to have satisfied consumers who are being effectively and efficiently, but also in a pleasing way, helped by a consumer agent from a call centre,” said Casserly.

He added: “I think it’s a kind of heritage of the tourism industry why that culture is here already. There is also a stable, well-educated labour force, and of course the economic part is also important but if it was all about that, I could have transferred to India and that would have saved me far more money. But you must never lose sight of your first prime objective, which is to deliver high quality service to the consumers.”

The new contract between Philips and Sitel, which comes into place in April, represents about US$3 million a year in investment.

Sitel’s list of clients includes other major international companies such as General Motors, America Online, Microsoft and Ericsson.