500 employees will leave their call center to move across town in move for efficiency

Alorica Inc., which locally operates a pair of large call centers, plans to consolidate the two sites into one and transfer most of its Clovis employees to northwest Fresno.

Alorica employs about 500 workers at its 30,000-square-foot Clovis location in the Village Square shopping center on Shaw Avenue between Villa and Minnewawa avenues. Ken Muché, an Alorica spokesman, said the Clovis center’s operations will be transferred to a larger 51,000-square-foot, two-story building about nine miles away on Blythe Avenue north of Shaw in northwest Fresno.

The Clovis site has been a call center since 2000, but expanded in 2010, hiring several hundred people when it landed a contract to handle service calls for Verizon Wireless. On the first of several days in October 2010 that the company accepted applications, about 700 people applied. At that time, in the midst of an economic recession, Fresno County’s unemployment rate was about 16 percent, compared to 7.5 percent as of this past September.

Alorica’s Blythe Avenue call center opened in 2012 as the company expanded to a second location with plans to hire about 275 full-time workers.

Alorica has not announced a schedule for the relocation, citing reasons tied to industry competition. But Muché said that once the transition is complete, none of its employees will remain in Clovis.

“We are relocating the vast majority of jobs at our Clovis site to our nearby office in Fresno,” Muché said. “By combining these two large workforces into one location, we’ll provide a better team-oriented environment (and) greater development opportunities for our employees” as well as customer-service efficiency for clients.

Muché did not specify how many jobs will be available for the Clovis employees or how many workers could lose their jobs in the consolidation. “Employees that want to transfer do not need to reapply for their job,” he said. “For those team members who don’t transfer, we’re providing outplacement services.”

This story was originally published November 8, 2017 at 1:47 PM with the headline "500 employees will leave their call center to move across town in move for efficiency."