When Dell, the world’s largest computer seller, first announced plans to construct a business services center along the Oklahoma River last year, the company cited the quality of the Oklahoma City metro area work force as the deciding factor in its site location decision.

The fact that the 62-acre site is located in Oklahoma’s federally designated empowerment zone, qualifying Dell to take advantage of tax breaks and incentives, only sweetened the deal.

The company’s initial staffing at the temporary facility was to be 250 workers but increased to 500 workers after only four months.

A year later, with its first site up and running, Dell is already planning to expand its customer contact operation with an additional 120,000 square foot building, increasing the area work force to 1,000 employees by 2006.

The company’s second riverfront building will be a mirror image of the existing facility.

“The quality of the area work force made the decision to expand our operation an easy one,” said Karen Quintos, vice president and general manager of Dell Americas Contact Centers. “We have exceeded our performance expectations here for our customers since taking our first call [in September 2004].”

The Oklahoma City customer contact center interacts with a variety of customers and businesses. The employment increase is being driven by an expansion of sales professionals for additional lines of business, including public sector and corporate accounts, and the addition of service technicians and managers who provide technical resolutions to server and storage customers.

Dell has more than 55,000 employees worldwide. The Round Rock, Texas-based company last year posted profits of $3.3 billion on $49.2 billion in sales. The company plans to hit $60 billion in sales in fiscal year 2007.

Wireless Firm Sites Call Center

Dobson Cellular Systems, the ninth largest wireless company in the country, also recently expanded its call center in north Oklahoma City, lured by the local talent. The facility is already fully staffed with “some of the best workers I’ve had the opportunity to bring together,” said Jude O’Sullivan, director of business operations. The office became operational in mid-June.

Publicly traded Dobson Communications Corp. opted to shut down its Maryland center and expand its Oklahoma City operations by 25,000 square feet and 200 employees in order to consolidate operations closer to home and put some distance between its other major center in Ohio, Sullivan said.

“The logistics of getting everything together was probably the most difficult aspect of this,” he said. “Fortunately, we did not have a difficult time getting employees. We were able to find some very good talent here in a very short period of time. That’s usually the most challenging problem for anyone opening a call center — finding the right people quickly.”

Brian Boone, the vice president of business operations for Dobson, agreed.

“One of the reasons we chose Oklahoma City was because of the qualified labor supply at a reasonable cost,” he pointed out. “Where some of our other centers are, we didn’t have the labor pool we needed. Labor costs in Maryland were getting expensive. A lot of our reps had to drive on average an hour each way to get to work.”

The vast majority of the company’s customer calls nationwide are routed through either the Oklahoma City center or its sister office in Youngstown, Ohio. The local departments handle general questions, major accounts, Blackberry handheld units data and customer retention.

Meanwhile, in January, Denver-based CIBER Inc. opened its first CIBERsite in Oklahoma City, the first of several planned low-cost “made in America” application development centers designed to tap into the underutilized technology talent pools of mid-sized American metro areas.

“The creation of low-cost domestic development centers provides CIBER’s clients with new opportunities to leverage complex global sourcing options,” said Mac Slingerlend, president and CEO of CIBER. “There are many American labor markets outside the traditional technology centers that have skilled but underutilized IT workers who can get projects done faster and cheaper.”

The first CIBERsite, one of several planned through next year, will be located north of downtown Oklahoma City.

With a $30 million pipeline in prospective new contracts, CIBER plans to create about 200 new jobs in Oklahoma City and nearly 1,000 new jobs around the country during the next 18 months as additional CIBERsites become operational.