- Tension: We celebrate job growth headlines, but rarely ask what kind of labor economy we’re actually building beneath them.
- Noise: Business relocations are often framed as pure wins—jobs added, leases signed—without examining the deeper operational shifts or workforce dynamics involved.
- Direct Message: DecisionOne’s expansion is more than a facilities move—it reflects the reshaping of tech support work as scalable infrastructure, not human-centered service.
To learn more about our editorial approach, explore The Direct Message methodology.
DecisionOne Corp. has relocated its Tulsa, OK, call center to a new facility in the CityPlex Towers. The company plans to add 150 jobs to its existing 300-agent workforce over the next three to six months.
Headlines will likely focus on job creation and regional investment. But beneath the surface, this move tells a broader story about how labor and tech infrastructure are quietly reconfiguring.
DecisionOne isn’t just expanding; it’s optimizing. The company provides tech support services for major internet service providers, software firms, and hardware brands—sectors where consistency and cost-efficiency are paramount. Tulsa, with its lower operating costs and central time zone, offers strategic value.
But what’s most notable isn’t geography—it’s what the relocation signals: the evolution of support work from skill-based, relational labor to repeatable process units.
This is not inherently bad. In fact, during my years in marketing ops consulting, I saw how scalable support functions can boost overall customer experience—when done with clarity. But it also introduces a risk: depersonalizing the very work that underpins trust.
The headline hides the model
On paper, the numbers are promising: more jobs, more square footage, more capability. But growth alone doesn’t reveal how the structure of work is changing.
Most call centers today aren’t just centers of help—they’re centers of optimization. Scripts are tested, KPIs are standardized, and every touchpoint is designed to reduce variance.
This approach scales well, especially in hi-tech verticals where speed and resolution drive brand loyalty. But it can also flatten the human element into a ticketing metric.
Framing this relocation as a win is easy. And in many ways, it is a win for Tulsa. But from an operational lens, this is also about centralization, cost leverage, and performance modeling—hallmarks of the way companies are quietly turning services into systems.
DecisionOne’s move aligns with this shift: fewer regional nuances, more replicable outcomes. That may be efficient, but it raises an important question—what happens to the uniquely human parts of customer care when scale becomes the only metric that matters?
What the move actually signals
DecisionOne’s expansion is more than a facilities move—it reflects the reshaping of tech support work as scalable infrastructure, not human-centered service.
Understanding growth beyond headcount
The company now operates six centers across North America, but their role has subtly changed. These aren’t just spaces filled with agents—they’re operational nodes. Every relocation, every new lease, is a chess move in a larger game of margin control, experience management, and delivery standardization.
The good news: more people in Tulsa will have jobs in tech-adjacent sectors.
The opportunity: ensure that those roles don’t become invisible in the process.
Support work can be both efficient and empathetic—but only if leadership treats it as more than an input-output mechanism. As companies scale support operations, there’s room to reimagine the work itself: to equip agents with better context, autonomy, and feedback loops.
One overlooked aspect is the training and retention strategy that often accompanies relocations. Will these 150 new jobs be designed for growth or simply to reduce queue times? Are metrics focused solely on handle time and resolution, or do they account for long-term employee development and customer satisfaction over quick fixes?
Moreover, the physical move to CityPlex Towers—formerly a symbol of regional ambition—raises a symbolic question: will this location be treated as a community hub or just another facility plugged into a national grid?
The tone companies set in these moments shapes not just workforce morale but the brand’s footprint in a local economy.
It’s also worth noting how decisions like this fit into a broader labor landscape. With AI and automation changing the scope of entry-level tech support, the value of human agents is evolving.
The future of this work isn’t just about scalability—it’s about specificity. It’s about what humans can do that bots can’t: read tone, establish trust, resolve complexity.
And perhaps most importantly, the expansion invites us to look at how labor value is framed. Are these jobs pathways to more skilled roles within the company, or are they endpoints? Is Tulsa being integrated into a wider network of knowledge sharing, or siloed into a transactional node?
These are the kinds of cultural questions embedded in every operational move—but rarely asked until long after the fact.
Conclusion
DecisionOne’s relocation is more than a footnote in regional business coverage—it’s a data point in a larger trend.
As tech support becomes increasingly modularized, leaders have a choice: build systems that empower the people inside them, or reduce them to throughput.
Tulsa’s growth deserves attention. But so does the structure shaping that growth. If we want the future of service work to reflect both scale and humanity, we have to look beyond the ribbon cuttings.
We need to ask better questions—not just about where jobs are created, but about the design of the work itself. Because in the long run, the value of a workforce isn’t measured just in headcount—it’s in how thoughtfully that human capital is activated.
