Drawn by favorable climate, high-end communications infrastructure and especially the abundance of bilingual workers, CitiBank joined a trend by announcing it will add another 400 positions to its 1,200-employee Tucson call center handling the company’s commercial banking operations.

The expansion moves them beyond their current CitiCard collection and fraud prevention units. It will also add 37,000 square feet of space to its facilities at the University of Arizona Science and Technology Park. The New York City-based company announced they will open the new customer service center by August.

This is the company’s third retail banking customer service center. The other centers are in Florence, Ky., and San Antonio, Texas.

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“To say it’s going fantastic is an understatement,” said Randy McDonald, Tucson site president. He said employee turnover, always 150 percent per year or greater in the call center industry, is half of that, “and we’ve been able to find and retain quality workers here rivaling sites that have been in operation for 20 years.”

In making the announcement, CitiBank spokesman Jason Ott said, “The availability of qualified employees is important to us and Tucson has a high-caliber workforce. It’s also important to the market to have a number of qualified bilingual Spanish speaking employees. This is the fastest growing middle class in the nation with a lot of spending power.”

CitiBank joins what has become a stream of teleservice companies moving to the Southwest, especially the Tucson area. Other firms have made these announcements this year:

• Sears Customer Care Center is adding 400 more workers to the 600 people it already employs locally.

• APAC Customer Services Inc. is planning to more than double the size of its 700-person Tucson workforce to 1,500 people.

• GEICO is adding 100 employees to the 500 it has at its Tucson service center.

• Afni, a Bloomington, Ill., teleservice company that already operates two call centers in Tucson is adding a third, bringing its total local employment to more than 1,600 people.

“We’ve been in Tucson for seven years now,” said Afni Marketing Manager Alan Angelo. “It was the first place we expanded to beyond our home in Bloomington, and we’ve continued expanding.”

He said the city’s communications infrastructure and temperate climate drew Afni to Tucson, “because the call center is never shut down by a blizzard and we don’t have to worry about tornadoes, earthquakes or hurricanes.”

On the technology side, Angelo said there are fiber-optic cables and other communications systems that allow them to handle the call volume. However, it’s the workforce that’s made the biggest difference. “There’s a large enough labor pool that lets us hire the people we need, there’s also a quality bilingual workforce who can speak both Spanish and English well, which fits well with what we do,” he said.

“This is becoming a bilingual nation, with Spanish speaking people now accounting for 10 to 15 percent of the population and growing. It’s an important part of our culture and who we are as Americans. So, it’s important to us, because to speak in someone’s native tongue is the definition of customer service.”

The increasing number of call center jobs is also important to Tucson, said Mayor Bob Walkup.

“These are solid jobs with people making a really good income,” Walkup said at the at the CitiBank announcement.

Bruce Wright, University of Arizona’s associate vice president for economic development and a key person in bringing CitiCards to Tucson, said, “That a company the size of CitiBank would select this place says something to other companies about Tucson.”

Paying $10 to $14 per hour, Wright said, these aren’t low-wage jobs.

“Our goal is diversification of our economy and we see CitiBank’s presence here as serving that purpose,” Wright said.

Tucson Regional Economic Opportunities President Joe Snell agreed that the wage contribution is important, noting that the company “has pumped $15 million into the local economy in one year.”

CitiBank has also spent $10 million on electronics and another $2.5 million on furnishings for its existing 116,000-square-foot operation in the Science and Technology Park and is investing another $8.3 million in the new operation in an adjacent building.

“This makes a very positive impact on the local economy,” Snell said.

While new arrivals, such as Pella Windows manufacturing plant, “have a lot of sizzle, established companies are crucial,” he said. “This is an economy built on expansion of existing business. So, to see a company like this expand means a lot.”

E-mail comments for publication to editor@azbiz.com. Contact Philip S. Moore at pmoore@azbiz.com or at (520) 295-4238.