Largest U.S. call centers by number of employees 2018

With almost 47,300 call center employees in 2018, Alorica, a California-based provider of outsourced customer management solutions (such as call centers), manages the largest call center operation in the country. While most of the largest call centers in the United States belong to familiar U.S. companies such as AT&T and Wells Fargo, number one on the list is conspicuous through not being a household name.

Call centers versus contact centers

A call center is a centralized office used to make or receive large volumes of telephone-based customer interactions. Often call centers also handle additional forms of customer interaction, with online forms of interaction such as email, live chat and social media becoming an increasingly important part of customer service. Strictly speaking, a call center that handles such additional channels is called a contact center.

U.S. call center industry

Despite the cliché of call centers being increasingly offshored, the number of call center operators in the United States has been consistently growing for the last five years (881114). Thousands of new jobs have been created in the call center industry over the last few years alone, mainly concentrated in Southwest and Southeast (802250). This pattern of growth coincides with the states that have the highest number of existing call center jobs. Most likely, this regional distribution of call center employment is connected to the higher wages in the northeastern states.