Amazon will close almost all of its call centers in the US

An e-commerce giant, Amazon.com Inc., will probably close almost all of its call centers in the US, except for one. Hundreds of office employees will be transferred to remote work in order to cut the company’s rental expenses.

The company’s plans for the call center employees’ transfer and the Kennewick site’s closure were announced by Bloomberg on Wednesday. An Amazon official representative refused to give comments on closing the company’s offices, but confirmed the remote work mode for call centers.

Amazon has been searching for effective ways of reducing its expenses in the background of slowdown in the company’s earnings due to the rising inflation rate and economic uncertainty. According to Insider Intelligence, revenues from the US online sales will grow only to $1 trillion, or by 9.4%. For the first time in a while, this figure will fall so low. 

The cost-cutting measures have been introduced after the Amazon’s fast expansion of its warehouses and enhancement of its logistics during the earliest time of the pandemic, when there was a jump in consumer demand.

The pandemic of COVID-19 also forced a lot of companies to send their employees working from home for providing a good service to clients, but later they faced the workers’ resistance to come back to offices. Therefore, the Amazon’s offer to work from home can attract new employees and be advantageous for the company, because this industry is considered to have a high turnover. Moreover, the Amazon Connect software helps other companies, as well as the Amazon itself, to organize remote customer service networks.