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Essen / Berlin (dpa) - The telecommunications group Telefónica is reducing the number of its own call centers from seven to five.
One location in Essen with currently around 500 employees and one in Berlin with 100 employees will be sold to the Swedish service provider Transcom, as Telefónica announced on Tuesday in Munich.
Private customer director Wolfgang Metze spoke of a "very good solution for our customers and our employees [...] whose jobs we will secure in the long term with the planned transaction".
The green light from the Federal Cartel Office is still pending.
When it comes to handling customer inquiries, the telecommunications industry has long been relying on the expansion of its websites and automated responses, such as “chat bots”.
After using such sites, some issues have been settled and customers do not call the hotline as they used to.
At Telefónica with its mobile communications brand o2, the number of customer calls fell by an average of ten percent per annum over the past five years.
The two locations that have now been sold were particularly hard hit by this decline because they are responsible for very simple customer concerns - those for which information is also easily accessible online.
According to the information, Transcom has around 27,000 employees in Europe, and its corporate customers include PayPal and Mediamarkt.
"Transcom is growing rapidly in Germany, and we welcome the opportunity to expand our growing presence to include two strategically important locations," explained the responsible Transcom manager Robert Kresing.
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In the future, the employees who are currently still working for o2 will also take on other tasks.
The connection to CO2 will not be cut for the time being, as Transcom will receive a service contract for three years from Telefónica.
How it continues after that is open.
Five call centers will remain with Telefónica, these are in Nuremberg, Bremen, Hamburg, Rostock and Potsdam.
Telefónica Deutschland has its headquarters in Munich, another large location is in Düsseldorf - this is due to the 2014 takeover of E-Plus, which was headquartered in the state capital of North Rhine-Westphalia.
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210223-99-555737 / 2