FEATURE: Contact Center Corner

New Brunswick in Canada is rethinking its call-center strategy after a consultant, David Campbell, said the region would not earn enough taxes from their call center employees to cover the required services. According to TMC, New Brunswick has a goal of becoming self-sufficient by 2026, but the consultant has warned this goal will never be realized if the region continues to offer incentives to call centers that pay employees no more than $10 to $12 per hour.

"Those jobs filled a need, but now that we have low unemployment, we need to look for jobs that will contribute taxes that will pay for government services," Campbell said. "Essentially, we were attracting jobs that did not generate enough taxes to pay for the government services covering the worker.''

New Brunswick aggressively chased call center business in the early 1990s and successfully wooed major companies such as IBM and the Royal Bank to set up centers. But as India came on line, New Brunswick lost the basic call-out centers to the lower-cost Asian market, but retained the more sophisticated service centers such as IBM and Royal.  

The rise of the Canadian dollar above the U.S. dollar has put even more pressure on the Canadian calling center capital with several U.S. businesses reviewing their Canadian deployments

For more:
Call Center Industry in Canada May Require Drastic Change Article

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