Nest customer support changes to result in over 300 job cuts at California, Ireland call centers

According to reports over the past week, Nest is making changes to how its operates customer support. The end result is over 300 job cuts to third-party call centers that Nest contracts with in California and Ireland.

The Sacramento Business Journal reports that Nest is “changing its strategy related to support services.” This is negatively impacting the company that the smart home maker has previously worked with to operate its customer support.

Telus Voxpro is making approximately 240 cuts — a figure that The Sacramento Bee also noted last week — in Folsom, California given the recent move by Nest, which was an independent Alphabet company before being integrated into Google’s hardware division last year. Nest is the call center’s largest client, with only 12 employees being retained at that Sacramento site as a result.

Those workers, according to an email obtained by the publication today, will remain in “specialist roles that Nest deems as critical.”

Additionally, a Voxpro office in Dublin, Ireland is also seeing a cut related to Nest that will result in over 100 employees being fired. No date was specified for Europe, but the American-based Nest call center will continue operations until May 31st.

Meanwhile, an alleged internal account of the situation has emerged on the Nest subreddit. The Redditor makes a handful of claims relating to where the call centers ware being moved to. We are still trying to substantiate them, including how the lost in “customer focus” can allegedly be attributed to the departure of Nest head of customer support John Moses.

In an interview from 2017, Moses touts his goal of reaching a high bar for customer support at Nest:

We want to bring what we call “Nestiness,” a warmth and humanness to the dialog, where we’re not robots, where customers don’t feel like the conversation is scripted, where they have a sense that we’re being personal and human.

We’ve reached to Google for comment and confirmation, as well as whether Nest users can expect any changes to customer support moving forward.