Palm City's iVox Solutions lays off about 120 employees

The Indian River Press Journal ^ | December 6, 2012 | Paul Ivice

[2ndDivisionVet]

PALM CITY — Because the contract with its biggest client expired, call center iVox Solutions LLC is laying off about 120 employees on Friday.

The workers have known about it for several weeks, iVox Chief Operating Officer Chris Stapleton said. Still, "it'll be a tough day because we really care about our employees," he said.

Stapleton said at least some of the layoffs should be short-lived.

The company, founded in 2003 as Old Cell Phone Corp., a vendor of used cellphones, will begin training Monday of 20 employees, who were not laid off, for an outbound call project for a marketing lead generation firm. Stapleton said he expects to call back about 25 of the laid-off workers Dec. 17 for similar training.

He said the layoff total could have been worse, but in the past month about 60 employees found jobs elsewhere and another 40 have made successful transitions to other iVox projects.

At its peak this summer, iVox had more than 500 employees, with about three-fourths of them taking inbound calls from Simple Mobile customers. But after California-based Simple Mobile was acquired in May by Tracfone Wireless Inc., the U.S. subsidiary of Mexico's America Movil cellphone carrier, the Simple Mobile contract went to Tracfone call centers overseas...