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Executives Increasingly Interested in Moving Contact Centers to the Philippines

By Amanda Ciccatelli, TMCnet Web Editor

A revolution has been reshaping the call center industry over the last few years, as the Philippines, a former United States colony with a large population of English-speaking young people, has become the new call center hub.

Today, about 400,000 Filipinos spend their nights talking to American consumers, according to the New York Times. Companies such as AT&T (News - Alert), JPMorgan Chase and Expedia have all outsourced their call centers to the Philippines, or even built their own. These jobs have come from the U.S., Europe and India as outsourcers followed their clients to the Philippines.

In the past, the industry focused on migrating to countries with large English-speaking populations and low labor costs, which led them to India. But now, executives are identifying places best suited for certain tasks.

Recently, call center executives in the Philippines have joined forces to strengthen the position of SME-based, Filipino-owned contact centers locally and internationally through The Philippine Call Center Alliance, Inc., or PhilCall.

Established in 2007, PhilCall gives small and midsize call centers a “voice” in the contact center industry, in order to help businesses grow as well as protect the country’s reputation. The Philippines is renowned in the international circles as the “World’s Call Center Capital.”

According to Magellan Solutions Outsourcing Inc.’s CEO Fred Chua and the president of the Association, PhilCall is working to define the association’s role in the growing call center market. One of its value propositions is to be the certifying body for adding legitimacy of the SME-based call center organization, critical in attracting customers.

Additional propositions of the association include benchmarking and sharing of industry best practices among members, personnel and career development planning, investor’s networking events, linkages with government agencies and private associations, access to financing support, and system sourcing.In the Philippines currently, there are about 800 contact centers and 10 percent of these providers are large multinational corporations that outsource front and back-office support from Fortune 500 companies abroad to the Philippines. Since the Philippines is one of the top offshoring destinations for voice-enabled services, these contact centers  have the ability to generate the most jobs in customer service, telemarketing, e-mail, live chat, social media, and help desk service or technical support.

“PhilCall aims to build national and international awareness, and establish the value of working with SME-based call centers,” Chua said.

In the future, PhilCall plans to unite all SME-based Filipino-owned call centers to seize a bigger share in the global outsourced service business through its trained English-speaking workforce.

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