International call center and business outsourcing company Qualfon Inc. has acquired Center Partners Inc., the Fort Collins, Colo.-based call center with outlets in Liberty Lake and North Idaho. 

Brian Kearney, a Denver-based spokesman for Qualfon, declines to disclose the terms of the transaction.

Kearney says the company acquired all six of Center Partner’s call centers and is planning to retain the company’s approximately 2,500 employees. Of those, Kearney says 1,700 are employed at the former Center Partners locations in Liberty Lake, Post Falls, Coeur d’Alene, and Hayden. 

With 1,500 people employed at its North Idaho offices, it ranks as the largest employer in Kootenai County, according to data collected for the Journal of Business’ Kootenai County largest employers list, published on Dec. 19, 2013. 

All of the centers will be rebranded with the Qualfon name, Kearney says.

 The company’s CEO is based in Boca Raton, Florida, but Kearney refers to Qualfon as a “virtual global organization,” and says it doesn’t keep a central headquarters. Kearney says each of its 11 locations handles some administrative tasks internally, and certain branches of the company are located in different countries. For example, Qualfon’s marketing department is located in Colorado, while its human resources and information-technology departments are in Mexico. 

“We are very decentralized,” Kearney says. “It’s an interesting kind of corporate structure.”

Qualfon started in 1996 and offers its clients customer care, business process outsourcing, contact center, and sales services. With the addition of Center Partners, Qualfon now has about 12,500 employees, Kearney says. 

Center Partners offers call center services such as inbound sales, customer service, technical support, and outbound sales. The company has been operating since 1997.

Qualfon mainly operates offshore and near-shore call centers, Kearney says, such as its outlets in China, the Philippines, and Guyana. The company was looking to grow its presence in the United States, which is what led it to Center Partners, he says. 

“It’s amazing, the complementary aspects of this acquisition,” he says. “What we really needed was a true major player with a good reputation in the United States, and that’s Center Partners. And Center Partners doesn’t have anything outside of the U.S., and their clients have been looking for near-shore and offshore opportunities, so it was a perfect match from that standpoint.”

 “Interestingly enough, they’re very good at doing inbound sales programs, while we’re more the experts at customer service,” Kearney says. “So that also ended up being a good match.”

Kearney says Qualfon has hired Andrew Reynolds, Center Partner’s former vice president of service delivery, as its new vice president of operations for its U.S. operations. Those operations also include Qualfon centers in Deposit, N.Y., and Harlingen, Texas, Kearney says. 

The acquisition is part of Qualfon’s strategic growth plan, Kearney says, and the company expects to expand its operations ihere.

“The biggest change we’d like to have is more clients and more jobs,” he says. “That’s really the impact.”

 Kearney says the number of employees the company will add here could be in the hundreds. 

“It depends on so many factors … but it’s certainly in the hundreds that we want to add,” he says.