Transcom Hungary Kft., a call center operator for leading international telecoms company Skype, is closing its Budapest center, laying off 200 staff, napi.hu writes. Zsombor Bereczki, the head of the local Transcom office, confirmed to the portal that employees would be made redundant, but did not wish to name the client firm that drove the decision. He said there was a three-year contract between the two companies, which would expire at the end of this year, and the mandate was not extended.
Napi.hu contacted Skype but the firm declined to answer questions on the matter.
The 200 full and part-time employees make up nearly a third of staff at Transcom’s Budapest center. Bereczki said some of them will receive other work from the company, while others can easily find employment in the service center industry in Hungary.
Swedish-based Transcom – which entered the Hungarian market in 2004 – provides client service operations to five Fortune 500 multinational companies.
Sad, But that’s the way the cookie crumbles …
Hire and fire!
A “social capitalism” is probably just a dream …
Wolfi, are you suggesting that these people should have their employment retained, even though there is no work to do? Or maybe you think that the client should be prevented from ending their contract at the stipulated time?
Sounds like a communist attitude to me.
If there is no more work for people to do, you cannot continue to pay them to do it. What alternative do you offer?
Outsourcing anywhere is simply contract work. No one in their right minds thinks that kind of work will last – certainly not with the lack of investment and improvement in educational standards needed to make it more competitive here.
Anyway, wouldn’t stop me wondering if their shares are worth a gamble: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-10918520
TDS, the problem is that there is work to do, quite a lot in fact. Skype is just moving their customer support from Budapest to Kairo in Egypt. The customer support in Budapest did a great job and yes Kairo may be a lot cheaper but I’ve seen their replies and they were riddled with spelling and grammatical mistakes. I don’t think it’s very healthy for the image of Skype to focus so much on saving money while compromising quality. I know what I’m talking about as I was a team lead at Skype customer support in Budapest.