Call centers in the Philippines
The most rapidly growing segment of the IT technical support industry in the Philippine is the call center industry.
The Philippine is one of the top preferences worldwide for setting up call centers because of the fact that Filipinos speak and understand English and are very adaptable to the linguistic characteristics of the varied target markets that the call centers serve.
Setting up call centers in the Philippine is also very cost-effective to compared to costs that you will have to incur in other countries, such as India or the United States, not only because of competitive salary rates but also due to the fact that Filipinos easily grasp and assimilate the trainings given for call center agents.
This means that training costs would definitely be lower in the Philippines compared to costs that have to be incurred in India or the United states.
The call centers in the Philippine support a wide range of services in the telecommunications, Internet, banking, and finance industries, among the many other sectors where heavy user support is necessary. Due to the large pool of graduates that the Philippines produces every year, the call centers can easily be filled with support agents.
In Manila, the call center areas are chiefly in Quezon City, Makati and San Juan.
Quezon City is reputed to be the most Information Technology (IT) friendly city when it comes to setting up IT and call center businesses.
There are also several call centers in the major cities of the Philippines such as Baguio, Bacolod, Cagayan de Oro, Cebu, Davao, Dumaguete and Iloilo.
The call center industry has sparked much interest in the government that policies are being drafted so that setting up call center businesses becomes more attractive and hassle free to business owners.
In 2001, there has been a flux of call center jobs from the United States to India and the Philippines. This was according to Technology Marketing Corporation, a Norwalk, Connecticut-based company specializing in call centers and telemarketing.
Recent trends indicate that worldwide call center jobs have gravitated towards the Philippines, Russia, India and China.
The Philippines, however, has a competitive advantage over these countries simply because 100% of the pool of call center agents speak English and can easily adapt to any form of English accent.
According to a news report at the Philippine Star in 2005, a UK-based company called Fizz Telecom wanted to take a quality product out to the market.
Fizz Telecom chose the Philippines for their call center.
The sales director of Fizz Telecom, Steve Clucas, was very much amused at the results since they were able to provide a quality workforce to support a quality product by setting up a call center in the Philippine.
The call centers in the Philippine are rapidly growing and has challenged a most worthy competitor country, namely India.
Although the Indians and Britons have somewhat a commonality in terms of culture, the advantage of setting up a call center in the Philippine with respect to other countries is that Filipinos can adapt to any English accent, including the American, Australian and the British accent.
The trend in India is that English is spoken with the British accent.
However, it is also very viable to setup call centers that cater to the segment of British English speakers since Filipinos can easily adapt to any English accent.
The Britons however, are less aware of the potentials of setting up call centers in the Philippines compared to the Americans.
Still, the majority of foreign-owned call centers that operate in the Philippines are from the United States.
Anyone who has had a long exposure to the British accent will realize that a Filipino English speaker's accent sounds similar to an American rather than a Briton.
This effect can be wrought to the advantage of Britons since an American voice will make a Briton realize that a call is not some form of phone spam, and the Briton would likely have more interest in entertaining the call.
This shows us that having Filipino agents for call centers exhibit performance advantages over various call center agent counterparts in other countries.
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