3rd Party Remote Call Monitoring Feature

Despite all the noise about call centers cutting back on off-shoring and moving back to the U.S., one overseas market is still holding its own.

According to a report in Philippine-based Inquirer.net, the Philippine IT-business process outsourcing industry posted an 18.7-percent growth in revenue last year to about $18.4 billion.

“The contact center (sector) continued to grow by between 15 percent and 17 percent,” said Danilo Sebastian L. Reyes, chair of the IT and Business Process Association of the Philippines (IBPAP). “Suffice to say that even with the challenges we face, the Philippine IT-BPO sector is still on the right path to achieving the major goals we have established, which was to hit $25 billion in revenue and reach 1.3 million in employment level by 2016.”

Reyes added that the industry was optimistic it would continue to grow, given the diversification of the services offered and its contribution to the overall performance of the IT-BPO sector. He noted that the contact center sector is still the biggest revenue contributor, but new sectors are stepping up. Those sectors include healthcare information management, which was the fastest-growing segment last year.

“If we capitalize on that opportunity, the growth of the Philippine healthcare information management industry will really shoot up,” he added. He was referring to the ongoing implementation by the U.S. of the International Classification of Diseases 10, which calls for the revamp of the U.S. medical coding system.

Despite movement elsewhere, the Philippines still remains the top destination for IT-BPO firms, due to the country’s educated talent pool, cost competitiveness, excellent infrastructure and other factors. US-based companies account for 77 percent of the services being outsourced from the Philippines. The remaining 23 percent is shared mostly by those based in the Asia-Pacific, according to Inquirer.net.