The Ural division of MTS, one of Russia’s top three mobile operators, confirmed to UrBC that the company was about to relocate its call center from Yekaterinburg to Samara.

‘The project is at the preliminary stage at the moment. We expect the relocation to start in June. Our Yekaterinburg office currently employs excellently trained workers whom we are interested in keeping, which is why MTS will do its best to help those of them who agree to move to Samara adjust to the new place. Those employees who prefer to stay in Yekaterinburg will be offered jobs within the company’s Ural division, possibly in our retail outlets. In addition, MTS is already negotiating with a number of companies whose call centers are based in Yekaterinburg in order to encourage these companies to see MTS workers as their priority job candidates. Also, these employees will receive training on efficient job-hunting and job interviews,’ MTS-Ural’s PR expert Daria Volkhina explained to an UrBC reporter.

At the same time, MTS-Ural’s call center employees are worried about large-scale redundancies. The topic was bought into the limelight on one of Yekaterinburg’s popular online forums but the discussion was soon closed down by the authors of the original post themselves. One of MTS-Ural’s employees said off the record that the workers had already been informed of the upcoming changes.

All in all, MTS does admit that the decision to relocate the call center was brought about by the company’s wish to cut back on expenses.

‘Relocating call centers from big, economically important cities with some of the country’s highest office space rent to some smaller ones is a common thing on the market. This practice allows companies to improve their business processes and to cut down on operating expenses. As for MTS-Ural itself, the division is not going to be relocated to Samara; we have no such plans,’ Daria Volkhina said.