One2One creates 1,000 jobs with South Wales call centre

UK mobile operator, One2One, is to spend £50m over three years on a new call centre in South Wales, creating 1,000 jobs.

Rhodri Morgan, the recently elected First Minister of the Welsh Assembly, will unveil the call centre site at Rhyd-y-Car near Merthyr Tydfil today. One2One has received government capital grants and training grants to persuade it to invest in the area.

Peter Scott, director of customer services for One2One, said the call centre was a vote of confidence for the region's workforce. "In terms of workforce, attitude is number one, and we have every reason to believe that the Merthyr area will be very good for that," he said.

The announcement comes as One2One pledged to create a total of 2,000 customer service jobs across the UK in the next 12 months.

The call centre will support all of One2One's customer queries and is part of an £87m customer services spend over the next year.

The call centre will be based on Citrix thin-client machines and will take enquiries by email as well as by phone.

"It fits in with One2One's commitment to evolve all our call centres into Web-enabled customer centres in the next three years," he said.

Stephen Wood, lead analyst for Ovum, said the decision to use a Citrix thin-client system was surprising given the size of the venture - Citrix is a Windows NT-based system.

"There are always scalability problems with NT - no matter what Microsoft says. You would have to throw a lot of money at this to get the server stable enough for 650 people, and you have to ask if it's worth it," he said.

The Merthyr call centre will be up and running by early September.