Can Call Centers Work?

Here’s an interesting little tidbit on HD Supply.

The company has a call center that currently has 230 people.  They are moving it to a town called Santee, which is in Florida.  This makes Santee the point for sales tax, which is expected, based upon current sales, to be $600,000-700,000 annually.  They negotiated some incentives, so the city doesn’t realize all of it, however, the key point is:
they are generating enough revenue to generate that amount of a sales tax!

Yes, HD Supply is in many market segments that many electrical distributors are not.  And yes they sell many products that electrical distributors do not (especially through their facilities maintenance division) but it begs questions of:

• could this model work for smaller contractors?
• could a call center work as an outreach strategy to reinforce interest in a customer?
• could a call center work to call on institutional accounts, small commercial MRO opportunities, hospitality, property management, etc?
• should you consider what products make sense for this type of initiative and the margins on this type of business?
• could it become an additional revenue stream?
• and if you are too small to justify this for yourself, could a group of non-competing, complementary distributors develop this model and either serve their own territory or could distributors with complementary product offerings work on this? or could the role be cost-effectively outsourced?  And could it be coupled with an eSales initiative?

Just some food for thought … a different model for a segment of your business?