Moving Up the Outsourcing Chain

Philippines being on the top of virtual contact center business, is moving up its competency to the next level to become the global leader in multilingual business process outsourcing (BPO).

The managing head of the Board of Investments Cristino Panlilio, said the agency has partnered with IBM in a bid to cash in on the Philippines’ multilingual talents as more and more companies, particularly from Europe and Asia-Pacific, expand outsourcing activities.

IBM itself will be the biggest catcher of those multilingual talents as it plans to fill in 3,000 more jobs over a one-year period. And IBM currently has 10,000 workers in the Philippines. IBM has the largest contingent of multilinguals with more than 200 local and cross-border talents supporting 15 languages, this number is expected to double in three years.

The number of local multilingual talents in the Philippines is three times the number of foreign multilingual talents and that number is growing by 8.7 percent annually. Aside from an already rich pool of multilingual talents from the BPO sector itself, the DTI said other sources of multilingual talents include the academe, government and the hospitality industry.

According to Panlilio, a training facility will be set up at the Ortigas Center. On the academic side, the partnership hopes to increase the quantity and improve the quality of graduates proficient in Nihongo, French, German and Spanish.

OFWs will be encouraged to return and practice at work the language they have learned abroad. There is also an initiative to simplify and integrate processes and policies on work permits for foreign nationals and visa applications for local talents going on knowledge-transfer abroad.

According to the project brief, there is a need to develop a research and development program focusing on multilingual capability since growth markets are in Europe and Asia Pacific. Today, multilingual talents in the Philippines mostly handle non-sales activities such as on customer services, document analysis, technical support and teaching.

Today, our local BPO business supports over one million client employees in 15 languages from Manila and provides global support to 84 countries in North and South America, Asia and EMEA, all delivered in their natural time zones. IBM’s capabilities and best practices in multilingual BPO business, coupled with strong and strategic cooperation from the BOI, will further establish the Philippines as an upcoming leader in the global multilingual BPO arena.

The Philippines continues to lead the global IT and BPO evolution with a strategic engagement with IBM that will cement the position of the country as a center of excellence in multilingual BPO. What we are witnessing is an acceleration of our country BPO industry service offerings that would help attain our industry targets of creating 1.3 million jobs and $25 billion in revenues by 2016. This is also part of BOI’s commitment to further reinforce our reputation as a preferred destination for niche BPO services.

Higher growth and more opportunities for the BPO industry in markets such as the UK. Over the past decade, the Philippine BPO industry has grown to achieve $11 billion revenues and employs close to 526,000 people. These numbers show that the industry is a major contributor to exports.

The briefing was organized by the founding members of the British Philippine Outsourcing Council and the Philippine Trade and Investment Center. The Philippines was the recipient of the Offshoring Destination of the Year Award by the UK’s National Outsourcing Association in 2007, 2009, and 2010. Britain is one the Philippines’ top markets in the European Union. Exports amounted to $395 million in 2010. Industry data also showed total investments from Britain amounting to $146 million last year.

Under the proposed Philippine Export Development Plan, services exports which include IT and BPO are expected to increase their market share to 24 percent by 2016. The British Philippine Outsourcing Council, an organization based in the United Kingdom, provides outsourced services to the Philippines.

Philippine BPO Firms Expand Social Media Services

Emerging technologies such as social media are not only changing the way people communicate, but are influencing the services offered by business process outsourcing (BPO) firms as well.

According to some BPO firms, their non-voice service offerings are slowly seeing growth. And a fair amount of non-voice BPO, such as back-office email management, chat processing, coupons processing and claims processing, among others. Social media work is also considered back-office. By helping clients in inserting experts into blogs and forums on the web, so that when there's an issue in the social media realm, we insert an expert there to resolve the issue.

Evolving BPO services

Non-voice BPO services are beginning to push the local BPO market to growth, as voice-based BPO services in the country near saturation. In April, the Business Processing Association of the Philippines (BPAP) said that non-voice BPO sector has outpaced the contact center industry in 2010, as it posted a high 30-percent growth rate last year. Employing more than 100,000 professionals in this sub-sector—with many of these BPO employees coming from financial and accounting, legal, and medical sciences backgrounds. It is only in the past year that the company has started doing social media relationship management, in response to the changing landscape of consumer technologies.

Consumers today are becoming pretty demanding and expect a high degree of satisfaction, adding that consumers now expect the same level of service rendered in different kinds of channels—be it through the phone, email or social media. Putting some attention into our technology business sector, a decisioning tool was developed to help agents personalize interactions with people on other channels, so customers get the same experience no matter what channel they use.

Young workforce

This shift towards multi-channel customer service demands a new set of skills from agents, but fortunately, the current crop of workers are immersed enough in these new technologies. The younger generation of agents have familiarity with texting, chat and social media. They have wonderful multi-tasking skills, and that's important when you're going to serve customers.

Moreover, BPO clients dealing with new technologies such as smartphones and tablets call for more advanced troubleshooting skills.

Outsourcing – Advantage or Disadvantage?

Many companies would say outsourcing your call center to a virtual call center can bring several advantages to your business. The primary reason why most businesses opt for outsourcing is due to infrastructure management and services can expect to save so much – up to 12% to 17% annually. It can help improve and optimize operations while at the same time greatly reducing cost. It also helps your business stay competitive in the large global economy. It is a strategy that provides immediate cost savings and productivity of allowing companies and organizations to focus on their core business.

Outsourcing can contract for services that you need without long standing costs like benefits, retirement, office space, management staff, and the like. If your company chooses to outsource to an virtual call center you will find that you will be provided with a high quality solution at a fraction of the cost of hiring an entire team. Note that the costs associated with hiring and maintaining an in-house employee are always higher than the costs involved with an outside service provider. It also substantially minimizes overhead costs without sacrificing important factors such as quality and the ability of your business to operate and grow.