The Monitor: Bilingual job opportunities at new McAllen call center will help RGV

Read original op-ed in The Monitor.

by Anabel Chavez, vice president of the Spectrum Customer Service Call Center in McAllen

Having a strong community starts with good-paying jobs. When jobs come to a town, neighborhoods and families benefit. Yet for too long in some communities, the number of jobs has been shrinking instead of growing. To help reverse that trend, Charter Communications is committed to hiring 20,000 workers by 2020. That’s why I am so proud to lead our first fully bilingual call center in McAllen where today we are holding a ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Charter is committed to bringing back and creating jobs in local communities like McAllen — and we’ve already shown real progress. By insourcing customer service calls that were previously handled by call centers located outside the United States, we can better grow our company while also improving the service we provide our customers.

This is why our investment in McAllen is so important.

This new bilingual call center will employ more than 600 Texans by the end of 2018. And these are good-paying jobs with benefits like retirement accounts and healthcare coverage. You can support a family with these jobs.

For McAllen, where our unemployment rate is higher than average in Texas, these jobs are a welcome economic sign that things are turning around. And because this is a bilingual call center, it is tailor made for McAllen, where 77 percent of our residents speak Spanish.

The benefits of this call center reach beyond McAllen. Opening a fully bilingual call center is part of our commitment to provide superior products and services to all of our customers, including those whose primary language is Spanish.

We take very seriously our responsibility to help our customers make the most of their Spectrum services, understand their bill or troubleshoot a problem. When a representative is on the line with a customer, they not only are perceived to be the company to that customer, at Charter, they are the company with the training, coaching and technology to provide a great customer experience.

Whether it is creating jobs, increasing access to broadband or enhancing our customer experience, Charter is proud to serve our customers and the communities they call home, including my hometown of McAllen.