New Edge beefs up jobs at call center

Vancouver-based New Edge Networks has hired 11 people to staff a high-tech call center, and plans to hire 10 more by the end of January, a year after shifting other call-center jobs outside the country.

These moves are part of New Edge’s continued integration with Atlanta, Ga.-based EarthLink Inc., which purchased the Vancouver telecom in 2006. That takeover has led to a gradual shift in New Edge’s culture away from its freewheeling roots, and toward the more staid standards of a large corporation.

The new call center staff will provide customer service for complex telecommunications products, such as the popular business-oriented multiprotocol label switching over DSL service, said Greg Griffiths, vice president of sales and marketing with New Edge.

“You need to understand the telecom dictionary, you need to understand data networking” for these positions, he said. “We took less technical products and customers and move them into EarthLink’s processes and call centers.”

That move cut down the amount of time that business callers spent on hold, but it also alarmed some longtime EarthLink employees. Other administrative jobs that were duplicated at EarthLink were also cut.

From 340 Vancouver employees in early 2007, New Edge had dropped to 250 workers by June 2008. Now the business is beginning to rebuild employment levels, which are at about 285 in Vancouver, said Michele Sadwick, vice president of corporate communications for EarthLink.

Linda Beck, who became president of New Edge in January 2007, kicked-off the transformation now under way. She left the company in mid-2008 for reasons that New Edge officials declined to give. Now Joe Wetzel, EarthLink chief operating officer, is the Vancouver site’s president.

He supervises a New Edge that has left behind the start-up culture that set it apart in its early years.

Gone is the pirate flag that flew outside its 3000 Columbia House Blvd. office, gone are the over-the-top cubicle decorations (which included a hammock, bean bags, grape vines, and mini-golf-putting areas). Gone, too, is Beer:Thirty, a ritual of letting loose every Friday at 4:30 p.m.

“We still do a lot of things that mean the most to us in terms of our culture. We have plenty of employee events,” Griffiths said. “Instead of decorating the cubes, with EarthLink we have chairs that are comfortable. We’re seeing more professionalism.”