T-Mobile USA to Cut 1,900 Jobs as It Consolidates Its Call Centers

T-Mobile USA said on Thursday that it plans to cut thousands of jobs as it closes seven customer service facilities across the country.

About 3,300 people work at the call centers being closed, but T-Mobile said it plans to hire up to 1,400 people at the remaining facilities, resulting in 1,900 net job cuts. The facilities set to close by the end of June are: Allentown, Pennsylvania; Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Frisco, Texas; Brownsville, Texas; Lenexa, Kansas; Thornton, Colorado; and Redmond, Oregon.

“Concentrating call centers is an important step to achieve competitive cost structures to successfully compete as [a] challenger and value player in the wireless market,” said Philipp Humm, CEO and President of T-Mobile. “These are not easy steps to take, but they are necessary to realize efficiency in order to invest for growth.”

T-Mobile has been losing customers in recent months, resulting in a decreased need for call center staffers.

The move comes in the wake of T-Mobile’s failed bid to sell itself to AT&T, a deal scuttled by objections from regulators. T-Mobile parent Deutsche Telekom said earlier this year that it will invest further in the No. 4 U.S. carrier, including a $4 billion effort to build a next-generation LTE network using a combination of existing spectrum and that acquired from AT&T as part of the failed deal.

Humm said earlier this year that T-Mobile would look to resume the “challenger” brand image it had crafted before its AT&T merger plans, noting that there isn’t another AT&T-like deal to be had.

As for the job cuts, T-Mobile is not stopping with the call centers.

“T-Mobile will restructure and optimize operations in other parts of the business, which will take place by the end of second quarter of 2012,” the company said in a statement.

The bulk of those cuts will take place by the end of May and will be in areas other than the call centers. They also won’t take place among front-line workers at the company’s retail stores or its network technicians, T-Mobile said.

The call center cuts were reported earlier on Thursday by The Verge, a technology news site.