Maureen Read

"Voice compression has come a long way and this helps facilitate call transfers and to lower costs," says Sony Electronics' Maureen Read, vice president and general managers of Customer Information Services Center, who runs a call center in India.

Maureen Read, director of Sony Customer Information Services Center in Gateway, also said quality of the work force is crucial.

"We have no problem finding good, talented workers, and even as our business has changed, we are able to find the technical people we need," she said."We're able to find a work force here that, even if they don't have the experience, can learn to serve our customers and grow in the job."

Also, she said, word gets around about which places have opportunities."If you take a buyout up north and take the money, where do you want to go?People have chosen to live here.Places like Monster.com (an Internet job-seeking site) provide people with the knowledge that there are major employers in Fort Myers."

When Sony first moved here in 1996, she said, "big businesses were few and far between," but now there's a fair number.General Electric and the Gartner Group operate call centers in Lee County.

It's been ongoing probably the last six months," said Maureen Read, director.If they have a good work history, "we'll probably take them back - once."

Sony is hiring technical writers, Web developers and technical support workers.

It's been ongoing probably the last six months," said Maureen Read, director.

"Tech support is a very difficult job," says Maureen Read, vice president of Sony's customer information-services center."Nobody calls you to say, 'Gee, we really like your product.' When somebody calls, you understand that they're unhappy."Though nearly 60% of its help is now provided online, Sony still gets 9,000 phone calls a day for PC and consumer-electronics support.Read says the target hold time for callers is five minutes - yet when we called Sony we were left hanging an average of nearly 15 minutes.

"I've gotten into so many conversations with people who had done it and failed," says Maureen Read, VP and general manager of Sony Electronics Inc's customer-services center, which outsources software-development, application-monitoring, and customer-service call-center functions to India and the Philippines.

Read considers offshore outsourcing a boon for Sony, providing the company with an extended, flexible workforce that can increase or decrease as needed and allowing Sony to do more projects because of the cost savings.In her search for an explanation of the negative reports, Read found a common thread."The difference was, they expected it to be like calling a temporary agency and saying, 'This is what I want,'" she says.