Call Centers’ Double Digit Growth for 2010
With the US economy inching towards recovery, the contact center industry is seeing double digit growth for 2010, largely due to diversification and expansion of major clients abroad.
The local industry is expected to finish the year with more than $5 billion in revenues, a growth rate of around 15 percent and beating last year’s $4.5 billion.
Local contact centers are also more focused on reducing attrition rate while improving the working environment of their employees.
Attrition has been a primary concern in a service-oriented industry that relies heavily on human resource. Industry data peg the contact center workforce at around 400,000.
In a press conference, the board of directors of the Contact Center Association of the Philippines (CCAP) also noted that the US remains to be the biggest market for outsourced call center services, though the services expansion has gone towards other English-speaking countries like the United Kingdom and Australia.
Incidentally, there is also a small but noticeable trend of some contact centers in the Philippines offering services to none-English speaking countries.
In a recent CCAP study, at least 23 percent of the respondents say they offer services in the Spanish language. Another 15 percent offer services in French while another 12 percent are Chinese.
CCAP President Benedict Hernandez said that while the numbers seem huge, the expansion towards offering services to non-English markets is not cost effective as there is a lack of natural speakers of these languages in the country.
“We’d rather focus on the other growth markets for now. However, we offer non-English services as part of a blended service package to clients,” said Hernandez, who is now chief of Accenture Philippines, after serving as managing director of eTelecare.
Meanwhile, CCAP Director Bong Borja said his company PeopleSupport has also offered services to Hispanic markets, particularly Costa Rica. He said that while there is solid growth, the concern is more of the price and lack of manpower to support the scale of this segment.
“Servicing of non-English markets is a good indicator of where we are going as an industry but there is still much to be done on this. The focus should be on existing English speaking markets,” Borja said.
source: inquirer.net
