TMCnews Featured Article

Provider of all-day telephone answering, call center and unified communication services Sound Telecom will soon open the first of three planned regional offices in Westminster, Colorado.  The Seattle-based call center company will open regional sales and operations offices in the Mountain, Central and Eastern Time zones. A Denver-based Mountain States Regional sales office and bilingual telephone answering service and call center is currently nearing completion, the company said.

“Our entire business is based upon professionally branding an organization’s phone answering, supporting their incoming website traffic by phone, chat and email response and executing a variety of outbound calling campaigns through an outsource model that allows them to focus on their core competencies while drawing on Sound Telecom’s 25 years of call center experience, processes, methodologies, equipment and staffing,” Michael LaBaw, President of Sound Telecom, said in a company statement.

The company plans to establish regional sales and operations offices in all US time zones. The Denver office began operations in January. A central time zone office will open in 2013. A third office, located on the East Coast, will launch operations in 2014. Sound Telecom said it was seeking to move away from centralized operations and put its call center and sales operations closer to customers.

“Our major reason for locating in Colorado is to better serve current and future customers in this area and open a bilingual telephone answering service and call center,” adds Michael LaBaw, in the company statement. “I grew up in this area and we are excited to be creating jobs in this area to serve businesses locally and nationwide from our bilingual call center. We are all about creating jobs in the Denver area, on USA soil. Our customers and surveys are telling us that the US consumer is tired with language and cultural barriers they experience with offshore call centers employed by many USA companies and they are concerned about confidential and personal data being shipped offshore-things like social security numbers and health and prescription data being handled by call centers in India, Philippines, Puerto Rico amongst others.”

Sound Telecom selected Denver for the new regional office because of the company’s large customer base in the area. The company also considered Denver’s large Spanish-speaking community in selecting the city, since it plans to conduct call center operations in both English and Spanish. The company noted Denver’s Hispanic population is 32 percent, double the national Hispanic population percentage.

The Denver operation already has sales staff and office management personnel; the operations team is in development. The company is looking to recruit 10 to 15 bilingual employees over the next eighteen months. Sound Telecom has joined the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Metro Denver in an effort to reach out to the Spanish-speaking community.

“Our purpose is to serve local communities by providing excellent call center support,” says Brian Gabriel, Sound Telecom’s COO, in the company release. “We are proud to provide bilingual Spanish-English operator support to both English and Hispanic-owned businesses.” The company offers live operator-assisted, translation services to non-English speaking callers, providing translation services for over 220 languages. Such services appeal to business, like medical practices, which require translation for a variety of languages, including, Russian, French, German, and Chinese dialects for non-English-speaking patients.