Adelphia to cut jobs at Maine call centers

BANGOR – Bankrupt Adelphia Communications will shut down part of its call center operations in Bangor and Augusta by the end of January.

The division that handles incoming customer calls is being closed. Customers who are used to calling a toll-free number and receiving help from Adelphia employees in Bangor and Augusta soon will have their calls rerouted to one of 11 call centers the company will maintain nationwide instead of its current 70, said area manager Kathy Hounsell on Wednesday.

Adelphia will continue to employ people in Bangor and Augusta whose duties will be to make outbound customer service calls, such as to remind customers to pay their bills or to alert them to upcoming installations and repairs and to dispatch technical crews to subscribers’ homes, Hounsell said.

How many people will be laid off in Maine is not known. The number could be 40 or more, according to the company’s spokeswoman, Erica Stull, based in Denver.

Currently, the company employs about 400 people in Maine who perform customer service and technical and maintenance support for 190,000 subscribers statewide. About 80 people are employed at the Bangor and Augusta call centers, and the company is reviewing how many employees it needs at the two locations to handle outbound calls, Hounsell said.

“We don’t know how many people will be needed to make those calls,” she said. “I don’t have a definite number.”

All of the call center employees were notified about the upcoming layoffs to give them time to figure out whether to move to one of the 11 call centers that will remain or to look for another job, Hounsell said. If they decide to move, part of their relocation expenses will be paid, she said. Employees also will be given severance packages and informed of state job retraining and assistance programs.

“This decision [to consolidate] was not made at all based on the individuals’ work performance,” she said.

Stull said Adelphia is following an industry trend by consolidating call center operations instead of having them spread out in numerous locations in several states. But unlike other companies, Adelphia will keep its 11 call centers in the United States instead of exporting the operations to India, which lately has been the country of choice for some businesses, she said.

The call-center consolidation and layoffs are not affecting technical and maintenance crews, Stull said. No job reductions currently are planned for those crews, she said.

Stull said the consolidation has nothing to do with the company’s bankruptcy, which began in June 2002.

“It’s not really related to the bankruptcy,” she said. “It helps us do our job more efficiently.”

Adelphia, with corporate operations in Pennsylvania and Denver, is the state’s largest cable-television provider. The company also sells Internet services.