Sitel

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Sitel

Type	Privately held
Founded	Omaha, Nebraska, USA (1985)
Headquarters	145+ contact centres offices worldwide in 28 countries
Key people	David Garner, President and CEO
Industry	Outsourced Customer Services
Products	Outsourced Customer Contact Centres
Employees	65,000 (2007)
Website	www.sitel.com

Sitel is a US company headquartered in Nashville, TN, which describes itself as "a leading global provider of outsourced customer contact center services". It maintains over 145 call centers in 28 countries.

Prior to its acquisition by ClientLogic, described below, it had 70 call centers in 25 countries and over 30,000 employees. It maintains offices in its previous headquarters location of Omaha, NE but because of it being bought out by ClientLogic, its headquarters was moved to ClientLogic's headquarters in Nashville, TN.

The original SITEL was founded in 1985 by James F. Lynch, as a result of his purchase of HQ800, an answering service company owned by United Technologies, for just $165,000. After the signing of its first major client in 1988, Allstate Insurance, SITEL's client list rapidly grew. Today the company serves many of the Fortune 500 companies, including General Motors, Verizon Wireless, Philips Electronics, Dell, Cox Communications, Capital One, Wellcare, and HP.

In June 1995, SITEL became the first publicly traded, independent teleservices company and was listed on the NASDAQ through an initial public offering (IPO). Six months later, they moved from NASDAQ to the NYSE as NYSE: SWW.

In October 2006, SITEL announced a merger with ClientLogic, another outsourcing firm. On January 30, 2007, ClientLogic Corporation finalized its acquisition of SITEL Corporation. Less than one month later, on February 20, 2007, ClientLogic announced it was adopting a new corporate name and global brand. The combined company would now be called Sitel, note the change from all capital letters to mostly lowercase letters.

The company is privately held by private equity funds and majority owned by Canada's Onex Corp.