Southwestern Bell adding 100+ jobs

Southwestern Bell is opening up the fifth floor of its building at 600 St. Louis St. to make room for approximately 108 new customer sales and service representatives.

According to Mary Turton, area manager for the customer sales and service center, the additions will double the number of local employees who handle incoming calls from Southwestern Bell customers who have questions about their telephone bills.

Turton said Southwestern Bell considered expanding its customer sales and service operations in Oklahoma, Arkan-sas, Kansas, St. Louis and Kan-sas City before deciding to expand in Springfield.

"We felt like the economy in Springfield was such that we would end up with the most competitive employees, able to provide great customer service and make great recommendations to people for sales," Tur-ton said.

She added that hiring for the new jobs began in March, and all of the new employees will come from the Springfield area. But Turton, who handled South-western Bell's hiring in the 417 area code and in northwest Arkansas prior to her current position, doesn't expect any difficulty filling the jobs.

"We could tell that the people in this area have a very high work ethic and an interest in this line of work," she said.

Turton said new hires must complete training classes that last 14 to 16 weeks, and she said the renovations on the fifth floor should be finished by August. The training classes, though, will continue after that.

"We anticipate since this is going to make an operation in Springfield where, at times, if fully staffed, we could have up to 200 service reps that this will be an ongoing hiring pro-cess," she said.

Turton added that, as with all applicants, individuals who are interested in the new customer service representative jobs are encouraged to pick up applications from the guard station.

Pat Bly, Southwestern Bell regional manager, said the fifth floor where the new employees will be housed was previously an employee lounge. With the renovations, he said, most of the existing furnishings have been donated to the National Associ-ation for the Mentally Ill and the Salvation Army.

(The preceding article originally appeared in the July 2 issue of the SBJ Daily Update, a subscriber-only service.)