You're relocating your call center or starting up a new center. After narrowing your choices to one or two areas based on labor availability and total costs (and choosing designs and standards for your center’s décor, furniture and lighting), the real challenge emerges: finding the right space at the right price at the right time. Tight time frames (under 90 days) mean a slimmer selection; while six to nine months should increase your selection pool. You can still meet a tight time frame, but you'll still want to consider all the strategies here--and be prepared to devote heavy resources to the project so that corners don't get cut in the rapid decision-making process.
Call Center-Centric Spaces
Many new speculative building and existing structures do not have the large amount of parking, wide-open unobtrusive floor plates and heavier-duty heating ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC) systems that call centers require. That’s because call centers fit more people — as many as eight agents per 1,000 square feet (sf) — compared to a maximum of four employees per 1,000 sf in conventional offices.
Call centers usually need seven parking stalls per 1,000 sf, or, to use real estate terminology, a parking ratio of 7:1. The parking ratio for call centers is generally double that of conventional office buildings. Keep in mind that the parking ratio for your center may vary depending on how many agents you expect to commute by mass transit or by foot, which in turn depends on your labor pool and on the property you pick.
If you anticipate that a large percentage of agents will use mass transit, the property you select should have bus or rail service with hours of operation that match that of your center. Because call centers tend to remain open longer than other types of businesses, they require additional lighting and security.
If you need to get your center running in a very short period of time and/or if you have a large center, finding a selection of suitable location candidates could pose more of a challenge. A lack of available space limits your options and could lead you to overpay for a lease or to agree to a lease that offers you little or no flexibility to re-negotiate.
Large call centers might be forced to consider converting former retail properties or to design and construct completely new facilities. The planning and implementation process for either of these alternatives calls for a much longer lead time.
Real Estate Strategies
To find a new home for your call center, there are some important concepts to remember and questions to ask yourself as you make your real estate decisions.
Focus on Labor Cost
Real estate should represent no more than 10% of your total costs. You should not choose a location because its real estate is less expensive if the labor cost is greater than that of other communities you’re considering.
A difference of a dollar-per-hour labor savings can offset a difference in cost per square-foot.
Site selection should be less about real estate costs and more about a site's labor pool, its quality and the quantity of the people who staff the site.
Know Your Labor Market
Your labor force helps determine where you should find property and what amenities it should have. If you plan to employ agents who have small children, you should provide on-site child care or locate your operation near a day care center. If you intend to hire college students, your center should be near a school or should be easily accessible to it.
If your center needs bilingual workers, you should consider proximity to communities where that labor force is and be accessible to them.
Consider commute time. For managers and supervisors, a longer commute might be more acceptable -- especially if you're looking at a hub-and-spoke model where these professionals could have a reasonable commute to, say, two locations. but for agents, a 30-minute commute by car or mass transit from the area your expect to draw most of your labor from should be the rule of thumb.
The Importance of Image
Is it important for your call center to be up-front and visible? If you have senior management and clients visiting your centers, and/or if you need to attract professional people as your agents and representatives, you'll need to take that into account in planning for location and design.
If this is not a major requirement, you can look for less outwardly attractive spaces that offer the functionality you need. But remember to take into account the impact that a space can have on agent and staff morale (and the impact of that on turnover!)
Attracting and Keeping Employees
Picking the right property is crucial in attracting and keeping labor. Real estate consultants say that employees want adequate and safe parking, comfortable temperatures and enough washrooms.
Amenities such as child care, food courts and in-house gyms can be staff attraction and retention tools, and the cost to construct and provide such amenities can be offset by the savings in turnover.
Exit Strategies
How long you plan to be in a particular labor market also helps you choose which type of property you need. If your company plans to locate a call center with the goal of eventually adding to it, you should look for room where the building will expand, preferably next to the space your center will initially occupy, and put your intentions in writing. Your options include insisting upon a right of first refusal on adjacent spaces; renting or building more than you need and retrofitting later; or agreeing to a “must take” arrangement where you pay rent on a certain amount of additional space within a year or so after you sign your initial lease.
No matter what your expansion plans are, you should always negotiate an exit strategy. Call centers do close, especially if a firm is about to acquire a company.
Your exit strategy can include landlord-approved subleasing rights and lease cancellation or termination options, which usually have penalty clauses, but which are certainly cheaper than paying rent for space you don't need anymore. If a termination clause is a part of your lease, obligations to restore the property you occupied to its original condition, especially if subleasing is not an option, should be carefully negotiated: You don't want to be responsible for returning the premises to shell condition.
Utilities
Deciding how often your center needs to operate helps you determine your property’s utility and telecom requirements. If your call center needs to stay open all the time, then you may consider property that has more than one power feed.
Consultants advise that you contact the power companies to find out why, how often and for how long outages can occur.
If you rely on UPSs, the building must have the room and the structural integrity for them. You need approval from the building architect and mechanical engineer. UPS battery cabinets alone can weigh 3,000 lbs, or about 400 lbs per sf, a typical above-grade space permits only 45 lbs per sf floor loading.
You can also look for a building with standby power, which may be easier to find than you'd imagine.
For centers that primarily make outbound calls, a UPS with 30 minutes of battery time is often adequate. Most power comes back on in minutes. If the outage is longer, the UPS allows your call center to transfer its files to other call centers or to disaster recovery sites before you shut down your and agents’ workstations.
Just as you should consider property with multiple power feeds, you also should also try to find space that is fed by trunks that loop through more than one of your telco’s central offices.
Local Competition from Other Call Centers
Having two or more call centers in the same development or immediate area could potentially lead to tough competition for agents. Real estate consultants strongly advise that you carefully research who owns and leases property where you want to place your center. If you are the first center on a piece of property, you should negotiate exclusivity arrangements or noncompete clauses in your leases.
Where skills your center needs from agents are different enough from another center's needs, the two can likely coexist successfully.
Renovate or Build to Suit?
Once you’ve decided what you want, you have the choice of leasing and renovating existing space or agreeing to a build-to-suit deal.
Real estate professionals can install new call centers within leased spaces in as few as 30 days. Build-to-suits, by comparison, usually take six to nine months from the initial decision to the completion of construction. Some cities, such as Oklahoma City, OK and Rio Rancho, NM, have fast-tracked build-to-suit arrangements to as little as three to five months.
Call centers work best with having all operations on a single floor or floor plate. However you can use multiple floors if you have different functions that do not need to be together, such as outbound calling and inbound customer service.
One of the most popular real estate options is converting retail stores and shopping malls into call centers. Retailing giant WalMart (Bentonville, AR), for example, has a separate real estate division. WalMarts fulfill many needs that call centers often have, such as large flat floor plates, plenty of parking and locations that are easy to get to.
WalMart is flexible and quick in making leasing and renovation deals. Call centers have set up in WalMarts in as quickly as two weeks. Among the well-known firms that have successfully remodeled these shops into call centers are Convergys, Sitel, MCI WorldCom and TeleTech.
