As many as 60 employees could lose their jobs.
By Gail Geraghty
Staff Writer

OXFORD – The ICT Group will close its Oxford call center March 2 as part of the company’s ongoing strategy to shift operations to offshore call centers where labor is cheaper.

Around 60 employees will lose their jobs as a result, but some may relocate to the company’s one remaining call center in Wilton, Barb Olson, vice president of the Growth Council of Oxford Hills, said Friday.

The Oxford location “has been a very high performing center for ICT, and we hope to attract another call center into that space,” Olson said. The company had employed around 130 people at one time selling credit cards to bank customers, and it later added an inbound calling service on behalf of insurance companies.

Oxford developer John Schiavi renovated the former 22,000-square-foot Hand-in-Hand facility on Route 26 to accommodate 200 telemarketing call stations when the Newtown, Pa.-based company announced the move to Oxford in 1997. The November ribbon-cutting, attended by then-Gov. Angus King, marked the first ICT call center to open in Maine.

At that time the ICT Group was the 10th largest call center company in the United States and the 12th largest in the world. It had 28 call centers in nine states, as well as Canada, England and Ireland.

The customer relationship management company subsequently opened call centers in Pittsfield, Calais, Lewiston and Wilton. All but the Wilton facility has since closed; the Lewiston facility was the most recent center to close.

Local economic developers welcomed the multi-national company as a new industry in the state to replace traditional Maine businesses like shoe making and textiles.

In the past few years, ICT’s expansion plans have focused on near-shore and offshore call centers, including Latin America, its Web site states. In May of 2003, ICT opened a 250-workstation facility in the Philippines, which is expected to grow to 700 stations in a few years.

“”The expansion of our operations in countries such as the Philippines is expected to reduce ICT Group’s labor costs, improve capacity utilization, and increase profitability,” the Web site states.

After the ICT Group’s insurance-selling operation in Oxford failed to take off as planned, the growth council began looking for another company to share the building, which had been equipped with state-of-the-art telecommunication equipment.

The search paid off when CCS, a company that collects debts for businesses, agreed to lease the space formerly occupied by ICT’s insurance operation. Olson said CCS currently has 30 employees.

Assistance for the ICT employees who will be losing their jobs will come with a Feb. 13 visit by state labor officials as part of their Rapid Response Program, Olson said. A career fair is also in the process of being organized, and will be held at the ICT facility.