The Call Center in The Philippines is becoming more and more an indispensable part of business operations for US companies. Since approximately the year 2000 US companies have found that almost anything that’s done on a telephone or a computer can be outsourced to a Call Center in the Philippines at significant savings over stateside costs.
In the early days of their growth, the call center in the Philippines was used primarily for back office tasks that required little or no actual conversation with the US caller. However as call center management and growth strategists began to realize what a great job Filipino workers did on these simpler tasks they ventured onto progressively more complex ones.
Today it is a hustling, bustling complex of high tech facilities, enthusiastic workers and sophisticated management who, in total, save US businesses 30-60% and millions of dollars a year (in aggregate) over the cost of comparable services sourced stateside.
Call Center workers in the Philippines might be either male or female, almost all of them are graduates of Philippine colleges, many have families and all highly prize and enjoy their jobs. And considering that their pay and benefits rank among the highest in the Philippines, why wouldn’t they?
It is not unusual for workers to earn 30,000 Philippine pesos a month. Often their jobs give them the opportunity to earn even more in the form of overtime and bonuses. These kinds of earnings put then solidly in the upper income range of the growing Filipino consumer class.
Philippine law requires that Filipinos or Philippine companies own the majority of the interest in these Call Centers in the Philippines but in fact many of them are owned by Philippine branches of foreign companies. That’s one reason that in many of them you’ll find a large percentage of the management is US or Western.
The work done at a Call Center in the Philippines tends to fall into one of two major areas…Incoming or Outgoing. Specific jobs vary greatly in complexity with the easiest jobs being those that do not require direct verbal interface with US callers…i.e. things like email customer support.
Some jobs, as especially in telemarketing, require a higher level of verbal interaction between the caller and the agent. Thus these jobs tend to get the the Filipino workers with the highest level of English skills and those agents also earn the highest pay. Call centers in the Philippines carefully plan the resources they allocate to each contract they get.
US companies are becoming more and more familiar with outsourcing parts of their business operations to Business Process Outsourcing companies (AKA: Call Center in the Philippines). As much as they might like to hire 100% US labor, it’s simply not always possible in the global economy they have to compete in.
The good news is that the money that US companies are able to save by using a Call Center in the Philippines is money that can be used to hire more local salespeople or put back into a higher quality product for the consumer or given back to shareholders in the form of profits.