Telefónica to create 310 jobs with a new call centre in Greater Barcelona

Barcelona (ACN).- The Spanish telecommunications multinational Telefónica will open a new call centre to take care of consumer queries in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, a city literally attached to Barcelona's municipality. The new facilities will be operational from the 26th of May, the company announced on Wednesday at a press conference held in Barcelona's Mobile World Centre. The new call centre will initially start with 50 workers but by November it will already employ 310 people. According to Kim Faura, Telefónica's Director for Catalonia, the company's strategy is to relocate call centres and place them near the areas where consumers live, instead of dealing with client queries from another continent. They took this decision because they noticed that clients were providing geographic information about network coverage that was not understood by the company's representative on the phone. This new call centre will be Telefónica's fourth one in Catalonia, after two already based in Barcelona (in the 22@ technological district and in Meridiana Avenue) and another one in Lleida. L'Hospitalet's new call centre will focus on helping clients going through digital environments. Faura's aim is to make this centre Spain's flagship for this sort of issues.

Kim Faura explained that they have already selected the first 50 staff members for L'Hospitalet's new call centre. They have diverse professional profiles but they all share high-level skills in the digital and communication environment, as well as being knowledgeable about the market's latest trends and social networks. In addition, the new workers will have to be fluent in both Catalan and Spanish, since they will be dealing with clients from throughout Catalonia. By November, up to 310 people will be working in this new centre.

At the press conference, Faura explained that users tend to be much more satisfied if they feel the person answering their questions knows about their daily reality or the area where they live. They want to avoid people saying the names of their home towns or counties and the person on the other side of the phone having no clue what they were talking about or making the person spell the town's name letter by letter. Telefónica reached the conclusion that people based in Peru or Morocco could not have the local knowledge needed to share a feeling of proximity with the clients. Therefore, the company's strategy is to gradually relocate call centres and base them as near as possible to the users.

The Catalan Business and Employment Minister, Felip Puig, stated that Telefónica's new call centre is a proof of the "obsession" to create new jobs, shared by companies, trade unions and the Catalan Government. Puig said that "good news" such as Telefónica's new centre are already having a positive impact on employment macro-economic figures. In this vein, he emphasised that the positive understanding between the Catalan Government and L'Hospitalet del Llobregat's City Council enabled the urban development of the Europa Square, a new business district located between Barcelona and El Prat Airport. This area is now becoming "a magnet" for large companies such as Telefónica and perfume-maker Puig, which recently unveiled its world headquarters there, underlined Puig. On top of this, the new venues of Fira de Barcelona are also nearby and host top international events such as the Mobile World Congress, the world's main event of the cell phone-related industry.

Felip Puig also said that, despite the fact that 310 new jobs are not a lot considering the high unemployment levels in Catalonia, the important thing here is the generation of an added value, and how a top international multinational such as Telefónica reaffirms its commitment to Catalonia and decides to invest here. In this vein, the Catalan Minister thanked the telecom multinational for having decided to strengthen its presence in Catalonia.