Greenville, SC among 3 finalist cities for Swedish company’s first N. American center

Greenville is one of three U.S. cities chosen as a finalist for a $5 million call center, the first in North America for Swedish-based company Transcom.

The company will make the final announcement Monday, said Donald Berryman, Transcom’s chief commercial officer. He declined to name the other two cities in the running.

The company will hire 300 people with the idea of growing to 1,000 within 10 years, he said.

Transcom provides customer support for companies such as Paypal and Western Union. Transcom specializes in telecommunication, financial services and e-commerce, Berryman said.

The Post & Courier Greenville on Monday was the first to report Transcom was considering Greenville.

Berryman, who lives outside Atlanta, said Greenville and the other two cities were selected from an initial list of 125 cities recommended by a site location company that company officials pared to 30.

Company officials spent a week in Greenville in the spring and were in Greenville again last week. The other cities had similar visits.

Last week, company officials met with economic development officials to look at specific sites available in office parks in Greenville County.

Berryman said Greenville’s advantage is the mild climate.

“People need to be able to get to work,” he said.

Transcom has a distribution center in Denver to ship materials and hardware to its 3,000 U.S. employees, all of whom work from home. The company has 66 call centers around the world and 30,000 employees.

The challenge for Greenville is the question of whether there are enough workers to handle jobs in customer service. Greenville already has large customer service operations for Charter and Verizon.

The jobs require good communication skills, understanding of businesses such as financial services and technology and an ability to multitask — speak, type and read a computer screen.

“Not everybody can do that,” Berryman said.

He said the new location could be the first of several in the U.S., and it may or may not become the North American headquarters. He called the Denver center a “pseudo headquarters.”

“We really liked Greenville,” he said. “One way or another we’ll be in Greenville.”