Why Filipinos Make Good Outsourcing Agents
English adeptness. Culture compatibility. Neutral accents. These are the raw distinctions that make Filipinos the best call center agents available at hand.
Outsourcing has become an appealing investment in recent years. Among the services offered in Philippine-based outsourcing companies are copyediting and indexing; web design and maintenance; data conversion, data warehousing, data capture and data entry; OCR and scanning services; proofreading; encoding and keyboarding; imaging services and graphics design; call center and customer service; abstracting and document conversion; typesetting; and tagging.
Philippines, is one of the cheapest place to acquire proficient, erudite, and of course, English-proficient outsourcing or call center agents, where the wages of customer service representatives can be as much as 80 percent lower than those of their American counterparts.
The Philippine customer service industry, where rates range from $6 to $10 per hour per seat, is flourishing. The world’s second largest-speaking nation has become the idyllic destination for outsourced call center operations of transnational companies. In 2002, the Philippine call center industry achieved $10.5 million and is fast catching up with leading player India, which raked in $12 million.
Moreover, more foreign investors are choosing the Philippines as a base for their offshore customer service facilities because Filipinos are more westernized than their Asian neighbors in terms of cultural alignment.
Tracing back the history, Philippines has been colonized by the Americans for almost 50 years and western business has been practiced by Americans with the Filipinos. The Philippine Mercantile Laws are ways the same as the Commercial Code of the US. As well, the Philippines and US share the same requirements for certified public accountants.
Filipinos watch American programs and are thus more accustomed with the nuances of American English. They also have neutral accents, compared with Indians that is why when customers phone up a 1-800 number, they think they are still dealing with an American, when in fact it is a Filipino on the other end of the line.
In addition, Filipinos are more customer-oriented and more patient in handling calls, aside from being accommodating and forthcoming.
India promotes itself as “cheap but good.” To make business, the Philippines does not need to sell itself cheap but capitalize on its innate advantages in the transnational market. Quality more than quantity should be the cutting edge in this business.