Say What?

GREENVILLE — The phones will soon be ringing at one new business, after all, that is its business.

Call Center Outsourcing Solutions, 747 W. Alexander, is scheduled to hold its grand opening 4:30 p.m. Tuesday,

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour is scheduled to be on hand for the ribbon cutting; entertainment will be provided Eden Brent and Mississippi Slim.

“I’m extremely excited,” said Regina Luke, CEO, Call Center Outsourcing Solutions. “It has finally come together after three months of lots of hard work.”Call Center Outsourcing Solutions will be a fully operational call center taking inbound and placing outbound customer service calls. Luke said the business currently holds contracts with 28 Fortune 500 companies.

“We recently went to the Global Outsourcing Expo in New York City and we were the only English speaking call center there,” Luke said. “We had people lined up at our booth wanting to speak with us and to see what we could do for their business.”

One of Luke’s clients is happy to have made the move because according to Luke, the company was losing eight percent of its customers monthly due to language barriers.

“More and more of these jobs are coming back to America because of language barriers,” she said. “Customers get fed up with dealing with someone who they can’t understand, and this is good news for us.”

The call center will open their lines for business with 15 new employees and will add an additional 10 new employees each month until they’re up to 50, said Luke.

“We’ve had to temporarily outsource some of our contracts to other centers because of the delay in being able to open,” Luke said. “But we’re ready now and our business will increase over the next few months and we’re still actively seeking new clients.”

According to Luke, a positive for attracting new clients is that the business is a minority-owned American company, Luke said.

“We’re getting lots of positive feedback from the clients we already have and even potential ones,” she said. “The clients love the fact that we’re in an area that so desperately needs jobs. They like us because we’re an American owned company and that our customer service representatives are native English speakers.”

The public is invited to attend the ribbon cutting ceremony.

Language barriers? I am a native Deltan and I can barely understand our "native" language! "Let me axked you a nudda querstion bout dat"?

Who in the hell is going to use this service? Okay, I get pissed when I call Dell Computer Service center and get someone from India with a heavy accent, but they are generally polite, patient, articulate and educated, so you get the job done.

Physically, this new "business" still looks like a deserted building. "Call Center" is a generic word for everything from credit card scams to porn! They are generally a venue for businesses to disguise their identity from both the customer and the IRS.

Does anyone know what the actual "business" of this call center will be? It's not that I don't trust our city council to have done "due diligence" regarding this enterprise, but as P.T. Barnum once noted... there is one born every second!

Forthright