Call Center Outsourcing In The Philippines
The Philippines ranks as one of the top choices for business process outsourcing today due to the Filipinos’ proficiency in the English language, excellent work ethic, strong government support and low labor cost it offers. Thus, making it the top industry in the country in terms of Outsourcing.
A call center is known as a central service operation, wherein agents handle calls in behalf of clients. Accounts or deals coming from clients usually involves telemarketing, mail order catalogs, computer help and product desk, transportation and freight handling fees, hotel and handling fees, banks and financial services. It’s size is described as “seats.” It consists of many stations where two to three people alternates in different shifts in order to cope with the different time zones of their foreign client.
Before, call centers provided only services related to the voice based customer support. But due to its continuing growth, more call centers are fast becoming more of a center which offer a wide range of services such as: e-mail responses, web based text chat services and other customer interaction channels and task, aside from voice based customer support.
The services of call centers include either inbound or outbound or both. Inbound services usually are calls received from customers inquiring about a product or a service a company or an organization provides. This includes customer support, operator and/or directory assistance services, multilingual services and credit related services.
On the other hand, outbound call centers use sophisticated communications technology to perform high volume communication handling services for outgoing calls mostly related to sales productions, information verification and collections. They use advanced telecommunication equipments such as:
Private Branch Exchange (PBX)- a computerized telephone switchboard with an expanded range of voice and data services.
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) -refers to an automated call handling systems where the caller interacts with a computer controller voice signal (either recorded real speech or computer generated).
Internet Protocol (IP) telephony, Voice over the Internet (VOI), or Voice over IP (VoIP) -is a system that uses an Internet connection to pass voice data using IP instead of using a standard public switched telephone network.
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)- uses equipment that enables a caller to speak an option instead of using the telephone keypad to select options.
Though, the Philippines still has a lot to surpass and improve in a hope to capture more Investors and Accounts globally by 2010, amounting to as much as $US10 billion.
http://www.disini.ph/res_phil_outsource_II.htm
http://www.theage.com.au/news/technology/manila-grabs-slice-of-outsourcing-pie/2005/12/13/1134236053112.html?page=2
http://www.mb.com.ph/issues/2005/10/15/BSNS2005101546764.html