“Our customers will benefit from their expertise.”
By Joe Strupp
About 250 McClatchy Co. call center jobs will be outsourced to a company that may transfer a portion of them to the Philippines, according to McClatchy officials.
Joe Haitz, president and publisher of The State in Columbia, S.C., confirmed that a McClatchy subscriber service center in Columbia, and another in Miami, would close in the coming months. That would affect 114 jobs in the Columbia locations, with about 136 in Miami.
“In our industry and some other industries, we are not in the call center business,” Haitz said. “The technology those companies are able to use we can’t do.”
McClatchy made the decision to outsource the jobs earlier this month, planning to contract with APAC Customer Services of Deerfield., Ill. APAC, which has operations in the United States and the Philippines, also provides subscriber services for some New York Times regional newspapers.
“We chose APAC for its quality service in handling customers’ calls and for its extensive experience in the newspaper industry,” Frank Whittaker, a McClatchy Vice President of Operations, said in a statement. “Our customers will benefit from their expertise.”Neither McClatchy nor APAC has indicated how many of the jobs, if any, would be transferred overseas.
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