June 13, 2006

Philippines Gets Contact Center Vote of Confidence From Teleperformance

By David Sims, TMCnet Contributing Editor

Teleperformance, a vendor of contact center management, has reported meeting with Philippines President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and other government officials in order to announce “phased expansion plans to double U.S. offshore capacities within the country, starting with a new state-of-the-art contact center facility in Bacolod City,” according to Teleperformance officials.

Teleperformance currently operates 2 contact center facilities in Metro-Manila comprised of approximately 2,200 workstations and over 3,400 total employees. The new Bacolod facility will open in August, and is expected to grow to approximately 600 workstations and 900 employees within its first year of operation.

Mayor Bing Leonardia, Bacolod City, is happy that his city “gets hundreds of excellent new job opportunities with an exceptional and financially strong global enterprise.”

Dominic Dato, CEO of Teleperformance USA said Teleperformance has had “tremendous and sustained success serving our U.S. client base” in our Metro-Manila operations and “we also intend to continue our growth there.”

Teleperformance USA has operations in over 40 countries.

Daniel Julien, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Teleperformance, called  the Philippines “a wonderful place for U.S. offshore services. The Filipino people are smart, nice and well educated so it’s a pleasure to work with such a quality workforce. We plan to double our capacities here in the next two or three years.”

The Philippines is one of the most popular destinations for outsourced call centers; earlier this year CT Group, Inc., a vendor of customer management and business process outsourcing, announced the expansion of its Philippines operations with the opening of a third facility in Metro Manila, in the City of Marikina.

ICT GROUP opened its first Philippines contact center in Makati City in April 2003 and its second center in Ortigas in July 2004. Combined, these two facilities operated 1,560 workstations at year-end 2005. The Marikina facility is expected to have up to 800 workstations in operation by mid-2006 and the three centers will be supporting clients across the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia.

However, some companies are rethinking outsourcing: Last year industry observer Kathleen Kiley wrote that, worried about cultural differences and possible lost sales, "many companies are relocating call centers domestically."

"With foreign-based call centers, U.S. companies are losing sales and customers," Esteban Kolsky, research director at Gartner told Kiley. Cost savings have been a big incentive to outsource, Kolsky noted, "but the culture clash is a big reason call center jobs are coming back."

96 percent of customers surveyed for a recent study state that a positive/good experience with a call center agent would increase their sense of brand loyalty. Read that number again, ninety-six percent. When's the last time 96 percent of anybody surveyed agreed on anything except free ice cream?

Teleperformance (Euronext: FR 0000051807) calls itself “the world’s #2 provider of outsourced CRM and contact center services,” and operates under various brands, such as Teleperformance for customer acquisition, customer service and customer growth programs, as well as TechCity Solutions and Cash Performance respectively, specializing in technical support and debt collection.

In 2005, the Teleperformance Group earned $1.5 billion dollars. The group operates 46,000 computerized workstations, with more than 60,000 employees across 268 contact centers, including 102 contact centers directly managed in clients’ premises.

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(source: http://news.tmcnet.com/news/it/-contact-center-philippines-/2006/06/13/1678712.htm)