The Global Association for Contact Center Best Practices & Networking

Nov 13, 2011 -- Teleperformance is closing its call centre at Water and Simcoe streets, leaving another large downtown office building almost vacant.

The Wind Mobile call centre opened in the former Bell Canada building at 364 Water St. in December 2009.

From July 2004 to June 2009, the Teleperformance call centre, originally known as Multi-Channel Communications, had also done contract work for U.S. cellphone provider T-Mobile for BlackBerry technical support.

It had about 50 employees on the Wind Mobile account in May last year with plans to grow to 150 as more subscribers signed with the new cellular service provider, Michael O'Connor, a co-founder of Wind Mobile and a Peterborough native said during the official opening of the call centre in May last year.

The last day of operations at the Teleperformance call centre in Peterborough will be Dec. 22, the company states in a release posted on a door at the main entrance to the building on Water St.

"This is in no way a reflection of the Peterborough employees' performance," the company states.

A Teleperformance representative couldn't be reached for comment on Friday.

The company plans to work with local officials to ensure the impacted employees receive ongoing support during the "transition period," the company states in the press release.

Wind Mobile has been expanding its network. Locally, SBA Canada has been building towers with Wind Mobile as one of its clients.

Teleperformance is using 34,000 square feet of the 46,000 square feeof floor space in the five-storey building, said David Smith, with DNS Real Estate — the listing agent for the property.

"It's a great location for another call centre if we can find one because it's all wired, it's got workstations, it's ready to roll out. The building has it's own generator," Smith said. "There are 450 workstations that are already there waiting for the next user if we can find one."

There will be 42,000 square feet of floor space available as of Jan. 1, Smith said.

Smith added the building has a C6 zoning designation.

"It allows pretty much any use: office, retail, residential on upper floors. We're looking at all options," he said.

The owner of the property is a company called 364 Water St. Ltd.

It's another loss for the downtown.

Earlier this year, the federal government decided it would pull many of its federal workers out of the downtown when it didn't renew its lease at 185 King St.

The AON Inc.-owned building on King St. has five floors with 71,000 square feet of floor space. Another company is building a 113,233-square-foot one-storey building on Crawford Dr., just east of The Parkway, for the Canada Revenue Agency and Human Resources and Skills Development Canada offices in Peterborough.

The federal government offices are slated to move out of the building on King St. in the spring.

Posted by Veronica Silva Cusi, news correspondent
Source: http://www.thepeterboroughexaminer.com

About Teleperformance:
Teleperformance, the global leader in customer experience, has been serving companies around the world rolling out customer acquisition, customer care, technical support and debt collection programs on their behalf. The Group operates about 88,000 computerized workstations, with more than 120,000 employees (Full-Time Equivalents) across 268 contact centers in 50 countries and countries and conducts programs in more than 66 different languages and dialects on behalf of major international companies operating in various industries.