PORTLAND, Maine — Lewiston-based Argo Marketing has ended a contract with Indian tech support giant iYogi, which picked Argo to host its first call center in North America with the eventual promise of 300 employees.
Jason Levesque, Argo’s CEO, said the company has retained the 30 people it hired for a three-month trial period with iYogi. He said the Indian company still owes about $72,000 for that time, for which it has filed a lawsuit in New York state, Levesque said.
“The best way to get out of a hole is to stop digging,” he said in a telephone interview Thursday.
Levesque, whose call center has about 80 different clients, said the company was able to divert employees hired under the iYogi contract to other work and still has plans to expand its about 500-person workforce early next year under other pending deals.
He said he’s not sure how many employees the company will need but expects more hiring in January.
When the deal was announced, state officials and iYogi said they expected to hire about 300 people in Lewiston.
Vishal Dhar, the cofounder of iYogi, said in a written statement that the company’s contract in Maine helped it understand the market. The company plans to relaunch U.S. operations in the second quarter of next year, he said.
“It’s unfortunate that our relationship with Argo Marketing did not work out as we hoped,” Dhar said.
Garima Misra Punia, a spokeswoman for iYogi, wrote in an email that the company is open to working with other vendors in Maine for its second shot at a U.S. operation.
“We had committed to creating employment opportunities in Maine specifically, and will work toward fulfilling that commitment,” Punia wrote.
Levesque said he made the decision to end the contract with iYogi for a variety of business reasons unrelated to the news Thursday that the company and Dhar were being sued by the state of Washington for allegations it scammed customers into buying unneeded services.
Levesque said he found those allegations shocking but that “it has absolutely nothing to do with us.”
The lawsuit in Washington alleges iYogi deceptively portrayed itself as part of companies such as Norton, Microsoft and Apple; sold customers Windows operating system upgrades that Microsoft offers for free; and duped customers into thinking they had computer viruses that needed to be cleaned up.
Levesque said Argo handled inbound calls to iYogi from North America, from customers inquiring about iYogi’s tech support services. Any customers interested in buying any of their services were then forwarded to another call center.
Argo is headquartered in Lewiston and has branch offices in Pittsfield and South Portland. It completed a $2.6 million expansion into the former McCrory’s department store in late 2013.