Dixons to take on 1,000 staff

Dixons: Booming customers services operations

Growing demand for customer support services is prompting Dixons, the UK's largest electrical retailer, is to take on 1,000 call-centre staff.

Dixons announced on Tuesday it was doubling staff at its Sheffield call centre, which already takes 100,000 customer calls per week on questions about products offered by the group.

The group includes Currys, The Link, PC World and Mastercare. Support for Freeserve, in which Dixons is a shareholder, is also given from the centre.

The expansion will take to £45m the sum Dixons has invested at the site, spokesman Tony Ackroyd said.

Coal centre to call centres

And it continues the rebirth of Yorkshire, badly hit by the closure of steel plants and coal mines in the 1980s and 1990s, as a focus for the call-centre industry.

More than 10,000 people are now employed in call centres in the region, which still suffers some of the UK's highest unemployment rates, a topic covered in the Sheffield-based movie "The Full Monty".

But Dixons, which employs 60 new staff a week at the centre, has nonetheless experienced problems recruiting sufficient staff, Mr Ackroyd said.

"One of the biggest challenges we faced with this project was being able to recruit high numbers of new staff in a very short space of time," he said.

Dixons said it was attracted to the region by the quality of the workforce and the level of support from local and regional bodies.

Shares in Dixons were unchanged at 227.5p in early trade in London.