Las Vegas bested 47 cities to land call center

By Mark Hansel

Friday, Feb. 13, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Las Vegas beat out dozens of other cities to become the site for a new Telus call center through a coordinated effort by city officials and the Nevada Redevelopment Authority that company officials say blew away the competition.

Telus International, a British Columbia-based company that provides outsourcing solutions for other companies, plans to open a call center that could bring more than 1,000 jobs to the city.

The building, at 2251 S. Decatur Blvd., formerly housed call center operations for Montgomery Ward and Healthcare America.

The jobs will pay about $25,000 a year for hourly employees fluent in both English and Spanish and about twice that amount for supervisors.

Telus International, a division of the Canadian telecommunications giant Telus, was lured to Las Vegas through the efforts of Las Vegas, its business development office and the Nevada Development Authority.

Las Vegas competed with 47 cities in 14 states to land Telus’ first U.S. call center.

The deal includes incentives, such as a $300,000 per year, five-year allocation of funds from the Las Vegas Redevelopment Agency, which will be used for equipment and tenant improvements to the building.

Telus has agreed that 25 percent of the workers hired will come from the city’s redevelopment area, which includes most of downtown Las Vegas and a few outlying areas. The deal will require an amendment of the city’s redevelopment plan, since the facility falls outside the redevelopment area.

Somer Hollingsworth, Nevada Development Authority president, said the process began when his office learned Telus was looking for a U.S. location.

“We kept reinforcing the message that we wanted them here and that they were important to us,” Hollingsworth said. “We worked it as far as we could in recruiting them, then we turned it over to the city. This could not have come at a better time.”

Hollingsworth’s comments could be construed in a few ways.

Certainly, the addition of 1,000 jobs in a neighborhood that has seen little growth in a city that has been hit particularly hard by the economic downturn is a major accomplishment. The fact that those jobs have been added at a time the redevelopment agency has come under fire for its support of some pending projects and its management of public funds is also a big plus for the city.

Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman said landing the call center was a team effort, but credits Scott Adams, business development manager for the city, with closing the deal.

“This is all about j-o-b-s,” Goodman said. “For the first time in a long time jobs are being created in this neighborhood. This could not have been done without Scott Adams going to the mat and wrestling them in.”

Goodman said he met with Telus officials to discuss what it would take to move Las Vegas ahead of the other cities, and Adams created the incentive package that put the city’s proposal over the top.

Critics have already begun to question the city’s contribution, but Hollingsworth said the competition was stiff and several times during the process it looked as if the city might fall short.

“There were times when we felt we had a deal and then we didn’t, and the city kept plugging away and made it happen,” Hollingsworth said.

Jeff Puritt, president of Telus, said Las Vegas separated itself from the other cities by most closely matching the 12 criteria the company outlined as crucial for a new location and demonstrating a real understanding of what Telus was looking for in a call center.

“The real differentiator for me was the ‘can do’ attitude that the redevelopment agency and the Nevada Development Authority brought to our inquiries at first instance,” Puritt said. “Everybody was eager to host our new business given the global economic environment and everyone was proposing incentives that were all about the same. The difference when we came to Las Vegas was that the folks that hosted us understood almost right away what our needs were.”

Puritt said when he outlined what items the company was looking for, city officials and the Nevada Development Authority worked to identify which attributes were in abundance here.

The list included a location in the Southwest, a significant bilingual population from which to draw employees and a facility that could be easily adapted to accommodate the company’s business model.

Specifically Puritt said local officials helped identify where that desired workforce was most likely located and also where infrastructure would be readily available. The call center is located between Sahara Avenue and Oakey Boulevard in an area with a significant Hispanic population.

“They really worked together as our partner to help develop a business plan that would ensure our near-term and long-term success,” Puritt said.

Las Vegas Councilwoman Lois Tarkanian has lobbied hard to bring new business to her ward, with limited success. She was elated not only that a new business was locating in her ward, but also at the prospect that others might follow.

“This is a great get for us,” Tarkanian said. “Hopefully this will convince other businesses that there are some wonderful opportunities in this part of Las Vegas.”

Telus International provides contact center and outsourcing services for large corporations around the world. As the contact, or call center, industry has matured, users have begun to look for a single provider that can accommodate all of their services, such as a diversity of language capabilities and access to a wide range of markets.

By providing services in many languages in a variety of locations, Telus is better able to offer its customers uninterrupted service in the event a call center is shut down because of a natural or man-made disaster, by rerouting calls to an alternate facility.

“This location definitely fits our business model in that it gives us more Spanish-language capabilities and it gives us more geographical diversity,” Puritt said.

Telus chose the site after scouting a number of locations in Las Vegas because it was more ready than some others, since it had been previously used as a call center and because of the access to infrastructure services, as well as the proximity to its target workforce.

Telus signed a 51-month, $2.9 million

lease for the site, and continuation of the city’s incentive for five years is contingent on Telus either extending its lease or purchasing the building.

The company plans to begin operations in March with 100 employees and hopes to have 500 workers on site by the end of the year.