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Tucson's call-center industry could be a major benefactor of national companies rethinking the outsourcing of customer service.

Next week, Tucson-based Contact One Call Center Inc. will begin handling after-hours calls for a California software company that previously contracted with a center in India.

"We've seen the outsourcing and now it's returning," said Judy Wood, who bought Contact One in 1981. "We're delighted."

Courtney Holmes, operations manager for the El Dorado Hills, Calif.-based Forté Systems Inc. said customer complaints drove the decision to bring the call-center business back to the U.S.

"There were a lot of complaints with language barriers," she said. "We were looking for English-speaking people, and (Contact One) had extremely good customer service."

The company provides technical support to doctors and their staffs to use its medical-billing software.

Wood said the contract will generate $2,000 to $5,000 a month for her 45-employee business at 818 W. Miracle Mile.

About 16,000 Tucson-area residents work in approximately 40 local call centers, according to Tucson Regional Economic Opportunities Inc., the local economic-development agency. Those employees make up 4 percent to 5 percent of the area's work force.

The agency does not have data on companies pulling call-center services back from overseas but is aware of the trend anecdotally, said Laura Shaw, a spokeswoman for TREO.

Wood said that in the past few months she has received multiple inquires from companies responding to customer complaints about foreign customer service.

"A lot of these (overseas call centers) offer very good service at the first- and second-tier labor pool," Wood said. "But so many companies have outsourced, they're down to the third- or fourth-level-tier labor pool."

Companies are realizing that lower wages overseas can cost them in lost customers, said Alan Angelo, marketing manager for Afni Inc., which operates three call centers in Tucson.

"We saw a lot of companies chase the low dollar overseas," he said. "But they weren't seeing the level of customer service that Americans have come to expect. Now top companies are looking to bring things back to the U.S."

A report released this summer by CFI Group in Ann Arbor, Mich., questioned the wisdom of contracting out call-center operations to foreign countries.

The study found that customers who believed they were dealing with a call center outside the United States rated their overall satisfaction 26 points lower than those who believed the center was U.S.-based. In addition, callers to foreign centers were almost twice as likely to sever business relations with the company.

Despite the cost savings, "There is concern that customers will be turned off both by the loss of American jobs and by the lower level of service," the report said.

That companies are responding to customers' frustration is a good thing, said Brad Cleveland, president of the International Customer Management Institute in Maryland.

"It's positive that more companies are realizing, 'We've got to get caller contact right,' " he said. "They're not off the hook just because they bring the service in-house. Ultimately, we want to see customers being well-served."

Cleveland said $485 billion is spent worldwide running call centers — $180 billion is spent by U.S. companies, but he did not have an estimate of how much is spent at home versus overseas.

He said call-center jobs in India and the Philippines continue to grow at a rate of more than 15 percent a year.

"Companies are running into mixed results out there," Cleveland said. "There's a cross-current with a number of companies bringing services back in-house, but the overall pie continues to grow."

Find more economic-development news online at www.AzStarBiz.com.