PRC call center adds 175 workers

The new jobs will pay from $30,000 to $40,000 and nearly double the company's presence

in Tampa.

PRC LLC, a corporate sibling of Barry Diller's HSN Inc., is expanding to open its second call center in Tampa.

The new center in Presidents Plaza on Eisenhower Boulevard will almost double the size of PRC's Tampa presence by adding 175 new jobs to the current 200. Including performance incentives, the annual salary range is $30,000 to $40,000.

Based in Fort Lauderdale where it was founded as Precision Response Corp., PRC has morphed from a big employer concentrated in South Florida into a global outsourcing player with 10,000 workers spread over 34 call centers in eight states. About a fifth of its call centers now are located offshore in India, Ireland, the Dominican Republic and the Philippines.

The company handles both customer service and business-to-business sales lead development for many Fortune 500 companies. It also uses its operators to handle HSN customer order calls during peak periods.

In addition to such clients as FedEx, AARP, DirecTV and British Airways, PRC, which is a unit of Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp, does a lot of customer service phone work for Expedia, Hotels.com and match.com, which are other parts of Diller's far-flung e-commerce empire.

"We selected this thriving market because the talent level and skill set of Tampa residents perfectly matches our clients and PRC's business goal," said John Hall, PRC chief executive officer.

Once one of the nation's call center capitals, Tampa Bay has lost a few big centers in recent years.

Company officials declined to identify the new corporate account that PRC said created the need for its second center in Tampa. The call center jobs will involve mainly outbound calls in English seeking to develop new business-to-business sales relationships.

"Typically this means making contact with a new client at least three or four times," said Alicia Miyares, vice president of marketing for PRC.

PRC was back on track in 2005 after running up an operating loss of $168-million in 2004. In 2005, revenues rose 15 percent to $337-million and operating income was posted back in the black at $22-million.

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