As wildly popular as the Do Not Call List has been
with consumers, it’s among the things that have been rough on
telemarketers, who have lost more than a million jobs nationwide.

The list, which will be 5 years old in June, covers 150 million
phone numbers.

That’s a vast swath of potential customers and their removal has
been a key factor in shrinking the telemarketing industry. The
industry still employed 5.3 million Americans in 2006, down from 6.5
million in 2001, said Tim Searcy, CEO of the American Teleservices
Association. Still, the industry generates sales of more than $900
billion a year, according to association figures.

Telemarketing jobs may be in for a rebound. While the outbound,
or sales call, portion of the industry has deflated, the inbound, or
customer service call centers, are growing, Jonathan Means, senior
vice president for Kelly Services Inc. in Troy, Mich., the global
staffing company, said last month.

Of the 110,000 call centers in the United States, 82 percent are
inbound contact centers with customers calling for help or
information. Just 18 percent are outbound centers, he said.

Employment at U.S.-based contact centers is growing at a rate of
9 percent a year, Means said. He said that’s because of companies
retreating from India and other countries and a rise of home-based
call center agents.

“Contact center business is coming back to the United States,”
Means said. “There was a trend of outsourcing those calls to India,
and you know the horror stories. Companies have discovered that
there is lost business when people have a bad call experience.”

According to figures compiled by the job placement company
Manpower Inc., telemarketing jobs are expected to decline by 3
percent through 2011. On the flip side, however, customer-service
representative jobs are expected to grow by 6 percent through 2011
as the telemarketing industry switches from making calls to taking
calls.

Manpower spokesman Paul Holley said last month that unlike many
telemarketing jobs, the customer-service jobs require more skilled
employees because…