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Despite Reports, Contact Centers Thriving in One Nation Overseas

By TMCnet Staff

If you listen to all the “accepted common wisdom”, call centers around the world are shutting their doors, packing up and headed back to the U.S. It seems that years of frustrated American customers trying to make themselves understood to those whose first language isn’t English has had an impact, and overseas call centers started shipping the work back home. That’s what many believe, anyway.

But if a new report in the Philippines’ Manila Standard Today is to be believed, call centers are doing just fine there, thank you very much. The report says that the country will add another 100,000 workers this year to its current 686,000-strong call center workforce.

“The Call Center Association of the Philippines [CCAP], which groups more than 100 call center companies, said revenues were expected to grow 15.4 percent in 2015 to $13.5 billion from about $11.7 billion in 2014,” according to the report. Call centers were described as the biggest contributor to the country’s thriving information technology and business process management industry.

CCAP chairman and President Benedict Hernandez said in a news briefing that despite expectations of slower employment generation in the sector, call center operations continued to grow in line with the group’s target range of 15 percent to 18 percent.

“We just ended a high-growth year. We’re on our way to another,” Hernandez said. “Headcount has grown 17 percent. Revenue is pretty much still on the growth path.” Hernandez made the remarks at a pre-event briefing ahead of next week’s 10th International Call Center Conference and Expo. The conference will take place at the SMX Convention Center in Pasay City Jan. 27 and 28.

According to Hernandez, the Philippines eclipsed India as the call center capital of the world last year, and added that the group would maintain its growth guidance until 2016, when total employment was projected to reach 1.3 million.

Not bad for an industry that many thought was ‘dying.’