Call centers, back offices, e-commerce centers — the names we call them are as varied as the functions they perform, the wages they pay and the communities they choose.

The term contact center has become popular, but the nature of that contact has broadened to include fax, e-mail and live chat, as well as telephone contact and even processing services that involve only written correspondence with employees, vendors or customers.

While communities are familiar with the distinction between unskilled, semi-skilled and skilled manufacturing workers, it is not as well understood that there is also a broad range of skills required in contact centers.

With all of this diversity in the nature of contact centers, how does a community determine whether it has what it takes to attract this type of investment?

The best starting point is to focus on the elements that make all contact centers successful, then to determine what niche of the industry best matches the community’s labor force skills, infrastructure, and competitive environment.

Here are some of the factors that tend to be important to call centers of every kind.

These operations are by their nature people-intensive and no company wants to come to a community where the only strategy for successful recruitment would be to start a wage war.

Companies may not want to be the only contact center in a community, but they do want an employer-of-choice position within a particular niche.

The best way for communities to address this factor is to remember that availability is a function of supply and demand, and that not all employees are created equal. General labor supply demographics that merely describe the characteristics of the labor force are only half of the story.

It is equally important to provide a complete picture of who the competition would be, what they do, and what their recruiting and retention experiences have been.

There are emerging factors that can give a community a particular edge with specialized centers, such as the need for bilingual employees and employees with specialized licenses and certifications, such as RN, LPN and certified medical coders; licensed insurance sales people and underwriters; and technical support certifications from companies such as Microsoft, Novell and Cisco. Although the current economic slowdown has may thinking that labor is a plentiful resource, long-term demographic trends indicate that skilled employees will be in demand for some time to come.

From a labor quality standpoint, companies are now less concerned about avoiding regional accents, and more focused on recruiting employees that project a literate, informed image in oral and written communications.

Contact centers invest heavily in technology and communications, but the largest geographically variable cost relates to labor.

Contact centers are always focused on delivering the best possible service at the lowest possible cost, which has led to the trend to consider smaller communities, as well as offshore options that focused first on countries like Ireland, moved on to Canada, and now highlights locations such as India and the Philippines.

The key to competing with low wage areas is to help companies to understand what their total costs will be, including with wages the costs of non-cash compensation and turnover.

Companies operating contact centers now have a much more precise understanding of the costs of turnover, and the more sophisticated centers place greater emphasis on assessing retention along with recruitment costs.

Other cost elements that can have an impact on the decisions contact centers make include real estate costs; costs to extend telecommunications and power services ; telecommunications rates; and taxes, including state-level interstate telecommunications taxes.

Infrastructure covers a range of factors the most critical of which are often:

• Telecommunication services: Every contact center has its own particular needs, but requirements for digital communications, broadband services, high speed/high volume data circuits, and multiple service providers for local, long distance and Internet access are common.

· Real estate availability: Contact center operations usually prefer to lease rather than buy, and often do not believe they have the time for a build to suit.

· Parking availability: Staffing ratios and round-the-clock operations have pushed preferred parking ratios to eight to nine free spaces per 1,000 square feet of real estate.

Before concluding a discussion of the characteristics that a community must possess to attract and retain contact centers, it is worth mentioning that a community’s attitude toward these operations also influences success.

There can be a temptation for communities to believe that the best strategy is to focus exclusively on the most sophisticated, highest paying contact centers even if it is the first experience with this type of business.

The communities that have been most successful in attracting that niche, however, are those that can show a history of successful operations that have hired at lower skill levels, and developed a work force that increases their skill levels on the job.

From the company’s standpoint, communities that have centers within several functional and wage niches can offer strong anecdotal evidence of the work force’s skills.

From the community’s standpoint, having companies that fit the entire wage and skill spectrum provides job opportunities for the broadest range of people and career advancement possibilities by allowing people to move between companies in the industry.

Many communities have found that though the income earned at a lower-skill contact center may not raise the area’s average wage, the health and other benefits offered substantially ease the overall financial burden on families.

Particularly now, communities that rejected projects or left them to fend for themselves during boom times are finding it difficult to reconnect with those opportunities.

Offers of incentives may be part of projecting a welcoming attitude, but perhaps even more importantly, contact centers want to have the benefits they bring to a community recognized and valued.

Competition for contact centers has never been higher as companies continue to search the world for areas that offer the best labor quality and availability at the lowest possible cost.

At the same time, contact centers now come in all shapes and sizes, and so do communities, so the opportunities for matchmaking are higher than ever as well.

Kate McEnroe is president of Kate McEnroe Consulting, an Atlanta-based company that focuses on site selection and economic development consulting. She can be reached at (770) 333-6343 or via e-mail at kmcenroe@mindspring.com.