The best call centers are in the Philippines

The call center industry in the Philippines began over a decade ago and has risen to number one in the world in a massive multibillion market that continues to grow. To show the robustness of the contact center industry or call centers in the Philippines, it has its own active industry group – the Contact Center Association of the Philippines (CCAP), aside from the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry umbrella organization, the IT and Business Processing Association of the Philippines (IBPAP). Last year, Philippine call centers had revenues of US$10 billion and over 580,000 employees in a thousand call centers spread out in 20 key locations. Call center revenues and headcount are expected to grow by 14 to15 percent annually up to 2016.

In the BPO industry in the Philippines, call centers – usually categorized as voice services – make up 60% of all provided services. The nonvoice services make up the remaining 40%. Together, the industry is one of the top three contributors to the Philippines’ gross domestic product (GDP). The other top contributors are overseas remittances and tourism.

Types of call center services in the Philippines

Call center services are typically divided into inbound and outbound services:

• Inbound. This includes agents taking in calls from customers for different levels of customer service or customer relationship management (CRM); different levels of technical support; marketing and sales such as customer cross-sales and up sales, account assistance, billing advice and subscription management.
• Outbound. This includes agents making calls to prospective customers for business to business (B2B) or business to customer (B2C) sales and telemarketing; customer advisories; customer counselling; collections (of payments); data collection; sales verification; surveys; list building; lead generation; and data cleaning and validation.

Benefits of call centers in the Philippines

Since call centers deal directly with customers, one of the biggest assets of every call center is its people. The human resources of Philippine call centers is one of its biggest draws. The benefits of having call centers in the Philippines include the following:

• Large pool of highly skilled, university educated work force, proficient in English, speaking with neutral accents, and having cultural exposure and affinity.
• Lower labor and operating costs.
• Government support and incentives for BPO industry.
• Many call centers with deep experience in providing high quality services using best practices, key performance indicators (KPIs) and service level agreements.

These benefits will result in the growth of the client companies’ business, productivity and profitability.