C&W said on Friday that the decision was in line with its "rationalisation exercise".  According to Stanley Coy, head of retail channels at C&W, the facilities were being closed because of their under-use which made them "uneconomical".

"(Given the) many alternatives for paying their bills and making queries these three locations have been seeing less and less traffic over the last several months and have become decidedly uneconomical to maintain," said Coy in a press statement.

C&W customers currently can pay their bills through Paymaster Jamaica, Bill Express, commercial banks, major building societies, and select credit unions.  There are 400 locations according to C&W.  The three offices, located in Port Antonio; Highgate, St. Mary and the New Kingston Shopping Centre, together employ eight workers - seven contract and one permanent.

C&W began its rationalisation programme in the early 2000s when the liaberalisation of Jamaica's telecommunications sector began.  C&W's rationalisation started with major staff cuts between 2001 to 2004, when Gary Barrow was the CEO.  During that period, staff level from 4,700 to 1,600, or by two-thirds.

Barrow streamlined the 15 layers of hierarchy within the organisation, upgraded the company's mobile and land line networks to add its first GSM network, and brought in a new brass of top managers.

The firm later outsourced its directory services to Global Directories, which up to two months ago, operated out of C&W's headquarters on Half Way Tree Road in St Andrew.  Additionally, C&W recently finalised arrangements to outsource a segment of its call centre operation in July to Accent, the American firm that has since January been conducting trials on behalf of the telecom in the twin-island republic of Trinidad and Tobago.

Accent had employed about 40 Trinidadians in Trinidad & Tobago to operate C&W's services since January as a part of test trials.  During the trials, calls made to C&W's contact centres in Jamaica were routed to T&T, to be answered by agents in that country.  At the time of the announcement C&W said that Accent would open a "new call centre facility in New Kingston in July and assume full responsibility for all incoming calls previously handled by the staff in CWJ's Kingston call centre".

The telecoms provider also noted that the "200 workers to be affected by the outsourcing would be offered jobs by the new service provider", and that it would retain responsibility for telemarketing, a portion of directory services and its Montego Bay-based call centre operations, which has approximately 50 workers.

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