CAR rental company Hertz is to create 600 jobs in a new tele-marketing project which will based in Dublin. It brings to more than 3,000 the number of jobs promised by tele-marketing projects over the past four years.
Hertz will be locating its telephone-service centre here as part of an IDA Ireland-backed £20 million project on a 12-acre site at the IDA Ireland Business Park in Swords, Co Dublin. The 80,000 sq ft building will be completed and fully operational during the last quarter of 1997 and will provide marketing and customer support services.
The new centre will handle all calls to Hertz from Britain and Ireland, as well as out-of-hours calls, and volume overflow from other European centres.
It will initially employ 200, but will have the capacity for 600 staff.
Hertz already operates car rental services through a franchise agreement here.
Announcing the project yesterday, the Minister for Enterprise and Employment, Mr Bruton, said the advanced telecommunications infrastructure in Ireland was an important factor in Hertz's decision to locate here. He added that Dublin was the ideal choice for Hertz because of access to a large, highly-skilled labour pool with multi-lingual skills.
Mr Bruton said tele-services was one of the fastest growing business sectors in Ireland. "In the past four years we have attracted 42 of the world's leading tele-services companies to establish tele-service centres in Ireland, creating employment for over 3,000 people," he said.
The Minister maintained the sector had the potential to achieve 5,000 or more jobs by the end of the decade.
Most of the companies employ people with fluency in more than one language. Some of the languages in demand include German, French, Dutch, Italian and Spanish.
IDA Ireland has managed to secure some of the world's biggest names for tele-service operations. These include IBM (which provides a customer support centre); UPS (courier services) and America Online-Bertelsmann (on-line services). Others carrying out teleservice operations in Ireland include Gateway 2000, Dell computer and Best Western Hotels, which handles customer reservations.