Two big acquisitions helped Irvine-based Alorica Inc. quintuple its revenue in two years.
The company debuted on the Business Journal’s list of private companies at No. 25 in 2015, reporting $570 million in annual sales in 2014 and 20,027 employees, including 73 in Orange County.
In 2015, it paid $275 million to buy Omaha-based West Corp. The deal also doubled revenue to about $1.2 billion and companywide employment to 48,000.
Then last year, it doubled revenue again by acquiring Expert Global Solutions in Plano, Texas.
It now ranks No. 10 on the list, with 2016 sales of $2.4 billion and more than 100,000 employees; only 87 are based in OC.
Alorica calls itself the largest provider of “customer experience solutions” in the U.S. and the third largest worldwide.
Alorica is in an industry commonly known as outsourced call centers, which the company calls “customer engagement centers.”
Its key advantage is the ability to connect with its customers’ not just by phone but also by emails, video chats, text messaging or social media, spokesperson Ken Muché said. Other advantages include scalability and the ability to quickly ramp up, he said. The company also works with systems that use robotics, also known as artificial intelligence.
The Start
Alorica was founded in 1999 by Andy Lee after he had a bad experience with customer service. Lee had worked as an executive at CTX Data Services and the personal computer company Gateway, which is now a part of Acer Inc. He holds a bachelor’s degree in business finance from the University of Southern California.
Alorica’s target customers are Fortune 500 companies. Its biggest industry serviced is healthcare, where it has 400 clients. Its next biggest industries are retail, technology and media. It aims for not just a portion of a customer’s business, but for its entire line.
It hires specialists, such as thousands of licensed pharmacists and technicians to staff two nondispensing “pharmacy centers” that provide advice. It services pharmacy benefits managers in 34 sites in two countries.
About 55,000 of its employees are based in the U.S. where it has more than 100 offices. It also has offices in China, Australia, the Philippines, Europe and Latin America.
Its “customer engagement centers” can range from 200 to 1,500. It also has 6,000 employees who work out of their homes.
Mixed Reviews
The company has rated poorly as a place to work on Glassdoor.com, an employee-review website.
“We’re not perfect and are always looking for ways to improve,” Alorica said in a statement about Glassdoor. “We’ve created multiple programs throughout the enterprise to drive employee satisfaction and growth, community involvement and philanthropic initiatives.”
Alorica cites many plaudits on its website—inclusion in the “Leaders” category on Gartner’s 2016 Magic Quadrant Report and tabbed as an “Execution Powerhouse” in HfS Research 2016 Blueprint for “responding to client demand for scale by rapidly adding capabilities with a solid talent strategy.”
