The acronym to know when it comes to the Philippines is BPO, for business process outsourcing. The term encompasses the traditional call center, where companies telemarket their servcies, handle customer inquiries, and solve billing disputes. BPO also includes industries such as legal/medical transcription, cartoon animation, engineering design, and publishing.
In the Philippines, watching the stream of BPO corporate announcements and counting the amount of call center openings in major dailies, it feels like the Southeast Asian country has just caught the early part of an outsourcing tsunami that will fundamentally alter its economy and fuel a powerful multi-year expansion.
Take this piece of news. Dell, the world's largest PC maker until its hiccups last year, just expanded its presence in the country. Mind you, this is a company that responded to complaints from customers who could not understand Indian accents by promising not to route tech-support calls to the subcontinent.
American computer maker Dell Inc. opened its second customer call center in the Philippines Thursday (March 1), bringing the number of local employees to 2,600, a company official said.
"We’re growing quite rapidly," Dick Hunter, Dell’s vice president for customer experience, told a news conference.
He said the company plans to hire about 100 people per month until it reaches the target of about 2,600 employees.
"Our expansion is evidence of the quality and talent of professionals here in the Philippines," he said.
Dell’s customer contact network includes more than 25 locations globally.
What should the Philippines thank for this industry where employment has shot up 10-fold to 200,000 in less than five years, and is forecast to create another 800,000 jobs by 2011? As a former American colony, it has the cultural affinity with the U.S. Proof? Basketball, not football (for Americans in the audience: soccer), is the most popular sport in the country. And it has an educational system (though deteriorating) that each year produces more graduates than jobs, so that means lack of labor won't be a constraint.
What will sustain this long boom? Continuing pressure in the U.S. to cut costs; and the "word-of-mouth" spreading among consultants, multinationals, and the whole BPO ecosystem that THIS is the place to be.
Dell's press release: "With its English-savvy population, about 100 similar facilities in place and 650,000 students, the Philippines is fast becoming the contact center location of choice in Southeast Asia."
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