Contact centre still targets 1,000 new jobs.

A CONTACT centre company is looking for 250 staff a year after opening for business in Newcastle as it plans to win 40% more sales in the next year The Listening Company, which has already created more than 600 jobs since setting up shop in at St James' Gate last October, has opened a new floor of offices as part of expansion.

The company, which provides telephone, email and internet contact centre services for clients including BSkyB, Toyota, Travelodge and Orange, announced plans to create more than 1,000 jobs when it moved to Tyneside in October last year shortly after taking over the essentiagroup.

Spokeswoman Penny Loveless said: "We are still gunning for the 1,000 jobs. The Listening Company has sites across the UK but Newcastle is a very good site for us. The Geordie accent always comes up very well, and there is the empathy, rapport and quality of staff we have been able to find."

The additional work in Newcastle comes from a mixture of new contract wins and growth of existing work with media and telecoms companies. Ms Loveless said: "We've also got a strong pipeline of new clients who have expressed an interest in Newcastle." The Newcastle office is now looking for workers across the contact centre spectrum from frontline to back office administration staff. The Listening Company, which employs more than 4,000 people nationwide, with annual sales of pounds 72m, grew by 40% year-on-year for the last four years. It is the fastest growing contact centre company.

Ms Loveless said: "Our target is to grow a further 40% next year. There is still a lot of business being done out there despite the recession if you are good at what you do. You've got to keep talking to your customers."

She admitted that in common with the call centre industry as a whole, the Listening Company had experienced a high churn rate of staff during its first year in the North East.

"We don't want to have a high churn, we want to have people who want to work in contact centres as a career," said Ms Loveless. "We are growing our employee engagement - we want to become an employer of choice in Newcastle.

We have a very strong promotion from within policy."