by King White, on May 23, 2016 5:00:01 PM
Call centers are a huge job creator in the United States. Many state and local economic development organizations work diligently to attract call centers to their communities as they see the value in these jobs despite the lower wages often paid. Over the last five years, certain states have been more successful than others in attracting new call centers to their region. To identify which states attracted the most call center jobs, Site Selection Group analyzed new call center projects opened across the United States between 2010 and 2015. This research excluded the expansion of any existing sites in order to focus on net new projects.
Over 550 new call center projects created nearly 200,000 jobs in the US
In the last five years, there were 557 new call center projects announced across the United States. These projects created 198,425 new jobs which doesn’t even include the expansion of any call centers that were already operating within a state.
“When evaluating locations for new call centers, companies evaluate a variety of factors including labor availability, labor cost, accessibility, dialect, bilingual skills, economic incentives, tax conditions and real estate availability, explains King White, CEO of Site Selection Group, whose firm completes over 70 call center projects per year. “It is a complicated process and you have to also understand the qualitative aspects of a community before making a final decision to open a new call center,” he said.
The following interactive map provides a detailed summary of the number of call center projects and jobs over the last five years for each state.
Call Center New Project & Job Creation by State
The Southeast and Southwest United States dominate call center growth
Many people always ask what region of the United States is the “hottest” area for call centers. Based on the results of this analysis, the Southeast and Southwest regions of the United States win the most call center projects and create the most new jobs. The following graph provides a summary of new project job creation by region.
New Call Center Project Job Creation by Region
The top 20 states for new call centers dominated by Texas
People say things are bigger in Texas. The statistics prove that Texas is the biggest winner by almost three times the next high growth state, Arizona. Texas attracted 76 new call center projects compared with 32 projects in Arizona. Regarding job creation, Texas created a whopping 33,875 jobs compared with Arizona’s 13,380. The following table provides a ranking of the remaining high growth call center states.
Top 20 States for New Call Center Projects & Job Creation
| Rank | State | Number of Call Center Jobs |
Number of New Call Centers |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Texas | 33,875 | 76 |
| 2 | Arizona | 13,380 | 32 |
| 3 | Florida | 10,211 | 34 |
| 4 | Tennessee | 8,250 | 25 |
| 5 | Nevada | 8,020 | 15 |
| 6 | Utah | 7,995 | 15 |
| 7 | Ohio | 7,797 | 17 |
| 8 | Georgia | 7,735 | 24 |
| 9 | California | 7,114 | 19 |
| 10 | Virginia | 6,975 | 15 |
| 11 | North Carolina | 6,405 | 14 |
| 12 | Colorado | 6,334 | 19 |
| 13 | Kentucky | 5,610 | 18 |
| 14 | Oregon | 5,530 | 15 |
| 15 | Idaho | 5,210 | 9 |
| 16 | Indiana | 5,066 | 12 |
| 17 | Kansas | 4,500 | 14 |
| 18 | South Carolina | 4,095 | 14 |
| 19 | Missouri | 3,835 | 10 |
| 20 | Michigan | 3,487 | 10 |
Conclusions
Finding the optimal call center location can be challenging because of the need to find the right balance of labor availability, labor costs, call center saturation, economic incentives, real estate availability and other critical site selection criteria. One thing is for certain: Many of the state’s economic development efforts have proven successful in attracting call centers to expand in their region. This growth will create more labor competition so it is more critical than ever to carefully evaluate where to locate your next call center.
