Comcast Cable will open a new customer service support center in
Morgan Hill to better serve its Bay Area customers, creating up to
500 new jobs in the South Valley.
Comcast Cable will open a new customer service support center in Morgan Hill to better serve its Bay Area customers, creating up to 500 new jobs in the South Valley.
The new support center will house a local call center to improve customer service levels and respond to local Bay Area customer service calls, customer inquiries and other needs for Comcast cable television and other service needs.
If the firm reaches the 500-job figure, it will become the fourth largest employer in Morgan Hill.
“I am thrilled that Comcast will expand its presence in the Bay Area and create these new jobs,” said Morgan Hill Mayor Dennis Kennedy. “Comcast is a valuable corporate citizen in all of the communities it serves across the Bay Area and I look forward to working with them as they become part of our Morgan Hill family.”
“We are excited to be creating these new jobs for the Bay Area,” said Laurie Giamonna, vice president of customer care for Comcast. “We look forward to handling our customer service calls locally and improving customer service levels thanks to these new employees. We also look forward to launching future new advanced products and services for our customers in the Bay Area, such as high-definition television and video on demand.”
“It will not be a telemarketing center,” said Garrett Toy, Business Assistance and Housing director for the City of Morgan Hill. He said it is his understanding that people, having heard or seen ads in the media, would call the center for information.
Andrew Johnson, vice president of communications, confirmed this and said customers would be calling for help and answers.
The new 60,000-square-foot facility, located at 18665 Madrone Parkway in the Madrone Business Park, will house the new jobs including customer account executive positions, customer service training and supervisory staff, operations staff and human resource employees. The center will begin handling customer service calls in the fourth quarter of 2003.
Johnson said the salary range and benefits package for the new center would be competitive with other call centers in the region.
“I think everybody will be very happy with the pay scale and benefits,” Johnson said Tuesday. He declined to state specific wage ranges.
Pay and benefits will be similar to a call center in Concord where, he said, 900 people showed up for 400 job openings the first week it was announced.
“I expect similar results in Morgan Hill,” Johnson said.
He stressed that Comcast would also definitely be looking for people with foreign language skills. The potential employee pool in South Valley area was a factor in choosing Morgan Hill.
“We looked at over a dozen different cities and found the demographics of Morgan Hill and the surrounding communities make it an attractive place to locate a center.” Johnson said.
The firm also will be hiring for management and supervisory positions as well as technical support personnel for the center.
“Morgan Hill can offer Comcast a highly skilled and diverse work force to meet their needs,” said Santa Clara County Supervisor Don Gage, whose district includes the South Valley. “We are pleased Comcast selected South County, over dozens of other potential sites, to build their state-of-the-art call center.”
Since escrow has already closed, Comcast will begin retrofitting the Madrone Parkway building soon and will begin hiring staff by early fall.
“We have a one-month training program before putting new employees on the phones,” Johnson said. “It includes classroom time and on-the-job training with a mentor before we let them loose. It’s a pretty extensive program – we like to take time to work with them so we can give the best customer service possible.”
Comcast is investing $17 million including costs for building a state-of-the-art call center and purchasing new equipment to support the new facility and its new employees. Comcast became the leading cable provider in the Bay Area on Nov. 18, 2002 when it completed its transaction with AT&T Broadband bringing together cable assets serving more than 21.4 million subscribers in 41 states including California.
Johnson said Comcast, whose cable television service area does not include South Valley or San Benito County, is not in talks to aquire Charter Communications, the local cable television provider.
Headquartered in Philadelphia, Comcast Cable is a division of Comcast Corp., a developer, manager and operator of broadband cable networks and provider of programming content.
Operating in 17 of the United States’ 20 largest metropolitan areas, Comcast is one of the leading communications, media and entertainment companies in the world. Comcast Cable provides basic cable, digital cable and high-speed Internet services. The company’s 55,000 employees, in six divisions, serve more than 21 million customers.
Comcast Cable serves more than 1.6 million customers in the San Francisco Bay Area and employs more than 4,000 people. In 2002 Comcast’s operations in the Bay Area contributed over $55 million in franchise fees to local cities and counties and an additional $20 million to the State of California.
Local residents interested in learning about future job openings at Comcast’s Morgan Hill facility should visit the website at http://careers.comcast.com/
