AOL employees are the latest to feel the impact of declining dial-up users. After the Internet company announced losing 835,000
subscribers so far this year, 1,300 call center jobs were cut in
three states.
Citing a drop-off in calls, AOL sidelined 7 percent of its workforce.
The majority of the 780 layoffs come from the closing of a
Jacksonville, Fla., call center.
Three hundred Tucson, Ariz., workers will be
cut, as well as 125 Ogden, Utah, call-center employees.
“Call volume is down significantly –- up to 50 percent,” Nicholas
Graham, AOL spokesman, told internetnews.com. Graham said
the AOL of 2006 is far different from that of 1996.
Once known as offering an Internet with training wheels, Graham
says the online service and its users have grown. Subscribers have
moved beyond taking baby steps to being long-distance runners.
Help that once required several calls to resolve is now being
handled with one call, according to Graham. Also, many
tools for diagnosing security problems, including viruses and spam,
are now available on subscribers’ desktops.
While AOL has seen a 50 percent drop in help calls, it also saw
U.S. subscribers slip 22 percent since 2004.
In March, AOL reported
18.6 million subscribers, down from a 26.7 million high in 2002.
Ironically, Comcast, a cable company pushing the broadband favored
by more and more AOL subscribers, opened a job fair for the laid-off
Florida call center workers.
To slow the slide of subscribers, AOL has undertaken several
measures, including partnering with Bell South, Verizon and Time Warner to move dial-up users to broadband.
Earlier this month, AOL also said it would join Clearwire in offering AOL High Speed.