LEWISTON — Carbonite is going through a growth spurt.
The online computer service’s Lewiston call center added 18 jobs this week and plans to add another 50 this year, Robert Frost, the company’s vice president of customer care, said.
It currently has 200 employees.
“We’ve been successfully ramping up and finding some pretty solid candidates,” Frost said Friday from the company’s headquarters in Boston.
The call center opened in 2012 in the same building as Spare Time Recreation on Mollison Way in Lewiston. It serves as the primary answering point for customer calls throughout the company.
“I’ve got a couple of people in Boston but just a few,” Frost said. The vast majority of customer service calls go to Lewiston.
“We are over 40 percent of the entire organization,” he said.
Carbonite is an online subscription service.
For a fee, the company stores data for home and business computers, serving as an encrypted backup for a home customer’s family photos, a retailer’s account info or a doctor’s most private information.
According to its website, the company has backed up about 300 billion files.
Frost characterized the customer service calls as “mostly post-sale.”
“We provide tech support and customer service to our home and business customers,” he said. “We’re the engine that helps drive the growth in the business.”
Starting pay varies between $13 and $15 per hour, he said.
“We provide technical support on Mac and Microsoft operating systems, both home and business,” he said. “It’s a great opportunity because anyone knowledgeable and passionate about technology, the IT field in general, this is a great stepping stone.”
Frost said the company will likely branch out with another call center in another area, but people in Lewiston should not worry.
“With our commitment to our customers, it probably makes sense to consider opening a second center in another location, but that wouldn’t be to downsize,” he said. “That would be just to absorb additional growth and create a redundancy.”
It will be hard to replicate the Lewiston workforce, he said.
“They already know how to communicate, are kind and respectful and have empathy,” he said.
“It just makes the job so much easier when you don’t have to teach people how to be nice to customers,” he said. “You just have to train them how to support the technology.”
dhartill@sunjournal.com
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