TeleTech will open new center, hire 150
TeleTech Holdings Inc. will open a customer service center in Jonesboro next month and hire more than 150 new employees, the Colorado-based company said Thursday.
TeleTech said the center will support a health insurance company, according to a news release. TeleTech's center in Sherwood employs 250.
Ken Tuchman, chairman and chief executive officer of TeleTech, said in the release that the Jonesboro site "will be integral to TeleTech's continued growth."
TeleTech qualifies for a cash rebate for a percentage of its payroll and a sales and use tax refund on some materials and approved expenditures for the project from the state, said Lisa Cogbill with the Arkansas Economic Development Commission.
-- Jessica Seaman
Arkansas confidence lagging, index shows
Consumers in Arkansas have less positive views about the economy compared with consumers in Missouri and Oklahoma and nationwide averages, a new index has found.
The first Arvest Consumer Sentiment Index released Thursday set an index figure of 67.4 for Arkansas. Missouri's was 68.6 and Oklahoma's was 76.4. The national index figure for June was 82.5. The overall index for the three-state region was 71.4
Kathy Deck, lead economist for the survey, said her team at the Center for Business and Economic Research in the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville sought to replicate the methodology used in the national Index of Consumer Sentiment conducted monthly by Thomson Reuters and the University of Michigan. The national index has a base value of 100.
For the index, the University of Oklahoma's Public Opinion Laboratory conducted 1,200 random, five-question phone interviews between May 20 and June 20. The calls were split evenly between Missouri, Oklahoma and Arkansas, with 70 percent of the calls going to landlines and 30 percent to cellphones. The Meinders School of Business at Oklahoma City University and the Bureau of Economic Research at Missouri State University also participated in preparing the index.
The index will be released twice a year. The next release is scheduled for November.
-- Claire Boston
State index falls 4.14 on international news
The Arkansas Index, a price-weighted index that tracks the largest public companies based in the state, dropped 4.14 to 347.42 Thursday.
"U.S. stocks plunged on Thursday after the crash of a passenger jet in Ukraine and as Israel announced a new ground offensive in Gaza," said John Blackwell, senior vice president and managing director of equity trading at Stephens Inc. in Little Rock.
Simmons First National and America's Car-Mart each fell more than 4 percent.
The index was developed by Bloomberg News and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette with a base value of 100 as of Dec. 30, 1997.
Business on 07/18/2014