Vivas Bajaj
Americans calling the customer service lines of their airlines, phone companies and banks are now more likely to speak to Mark in Manila than Bharat in Bangalore.
Over the last several years, a quiet revolution has been reshaping the call centre business: the rise of the Philippines, a former US colony that has a large population of young people who speak lightly accented English and, unlike many Indians, are steeped in American culture.
More Filipinos?about 400,000?than Indians now spend their nights talking to mostly American consumers, industry officials said, as companies like AT&T, JPMorgan Chase and Expedia have hired call centres here, or built their own. The jobs have come from the United States, Europe and, to some extent, India as outsourcers followed their clients to the Philippines.
India, where offshore call centres first took off in a big way, fields as many as 3,50,000 call centre agents, according to some industry estimates. The Philippines, which has a population one-tenth as big as India?s, overtook India this year, according to Jojo Uligan, executive director of the Contact Center Association of the Philippines. The growing preference for the Philippines reflects in part the maturation of the outsourcing business and in part a preference for American English. In the early days, the industry focused simply on finding and setting up shop in countries with large English-speaking populations and low labour costs, which mostly led them to India. But executives say they are now increasingly identifying places best suited for specific tasks. India remains the biggest destination by far for software outsourcing.
Executives say the growth was not motivated by wage considerations. Filipino call centre agents typically earn more than their Indian counterparts ($300 a month, rather than $250, at the entry level), but executives say they are worth the extra cost because American customers find them easier to understand than they do Indian agents, who speak British-style English and use unfamiliar idioms. Indians, for example, might say, ?I will revert on the same,? rather than, ?I will follow up on that.?
It helps that Filipinos learn American English in the first grade, eat hamburgers, follow the NBA and watch the TV show Friends long before they enter a call centre. In India, by contrast, public schools introduce British English in the third grade, only the urban elite eat American fast food, cricket is the national pastime and Friends is a teaching aid for Indian call centre trainers. English is an official language in both countries.
The Philippines has ?a unique combination of Eastern, attentive hospitality and attitude of care and compassion mixed with what I call Americanisation,? said Aparup Sengupta, chief executive of Aegis Global, an outsourcing firm based in Mumbai, India, that acquired Manila-based People Support in 2008 and now employs nearly 1,3,000 Filipinos. American companies are reluctant to discuss their outsourcing strategies, but privately some executives acknowledged that early on, they focused primarily on saving money. But as they gained experience in different countries, they realised that was not the best strategy.
?Certain phrases people use and idioms are important,? said an executive at a large American company that handles service calls through the Philippines. He spoke on the condition that he and his firm not be identified. ?We are getting better at it, but of course it is still a hot button.?
Analysts said call centres in the Philippines appeared to have helped American businesses respond to complaints from consumers who said they could not understand Indian agents. But it is unlikely to satisfy critics who say outsourcing is sending too many jobs abroad as millions of Americans struggle to find work.
This year, for instance, US Airways stopped outsourcing customer service to Manila and hired 400 agents in Arizona, California and North Carolina as part of an agreement with the Communications Workers of America union.
Some American companies like Delta Airlines have said they moved call centres back to the US to appease angry customers who wanted better English. Entry-level American call centre agents earn about $20,000 a year, about five times as much as similar agents in the Philippines and six times as much as Indian agents.
Nevertheless, the financial benefits of outsourcing remain strong enough that the call centre business is growing at 25 to 30% a year here in the Philippines, compared to 10 to 15% in India, according to Salil Dani, research director at the Everest Group, a firm that tracks the market.
American outsourcing or back-end companies like IBM, Accenture and Convergys along with Indian firms like Aegis, Infosys and Tech Mahindra have thousands of employees working from gleaming glass towers and even inside malls, which executives say young workers prefer so they can be close to shops and restaurants. In addition to language skills, the Philippines has better utility infrastructure than India?so companies spend little on generators and diesel fuel. Also, cities here are safer and have better public transportation, so employers do not have to bus employees to and from work as they do in India.
The call centre boom has also benefitted his country, previously a laggard among Southeast Asia?s tiger economies?its most popular exports were nurses. Last year, revenue from outsourcing, which also includes things like health insurance processing, animation development and software programming, totalled $9 billion, or 4.5% of the Philippine GDP, up from virtually nothing in 2000. The government has tried to support the industry with tax breaks and subsidies.