The Philippines’ top newspapers’ classified ads sections have been flooded with half-page to full-page ads of companies seeking for call center agents or customer service representatives. Almost every job fair has representatives from these companies. The Malacanang, the seat of Philippine government, has been advocating the “fastest growing industry in our country.”

A call center, as Wikipedia puts it, is a centralized office used for the purpose of receiving and transmitting a large volume of requests by telephone on behalf of a client. Clients include mail-order catalog houses, telemarketing companies, computer product help desks, banks, financial service and insurance groups, transportation and freight handling firms, hotels and IT companies. They are the companies who handle the 1-800 calls of consumers inquiring about a certain product or service.

The good thing is because of the relatively high cost of personnel and worker inefficiency in the United States, they are now outsourcing this service to countries where labor is cheap like India and the Philippines. Imagine a US citizen calling a 1-800 number asking about, for example, how to open the box of his new HDTV set. Little does he know that the customer service representative answering his call is picking up the phone time zones away from him.

The Philippines now gets an acceptable field area in the vision of foreign companies looking for call center services. The country has been a favorite because of the abundance of English speakers that are college graduates and Americanized when it comes to English accent and cultural affinities. It was stated on Wikipedia that “Filipinos are said to be the best outsourcing site outside North America since the accent is nearer to that of American consumers,” probably due to the deeply-rooted “colonial mentality” among us.

The call center service has been dubbed as the country’s latest “sunshine industry.” It is expected to generate thousands of jobs for the Filipinos. Reports from the Jobstreet.com say that there are still more than one-million call center agent “seats’ that’s waiting to be outsourced offshore , indicating that Call Center Industry in the Philippines really has so much potential. The government has been doing something about this. According to Malacanang, they will sponsor scholarships for those who wanted to be custom care representatives. I guess they should also focus on the curriculum of our elementary and secondary school education. Nowadays, studies have shown that a very few can really speak English fluently. That’s something for the government to watch out for - the deterioration of the English fluency of its population, its main attraction for the call center industry.

Mark Vicente
http://pinoytambay.blogspot.com/2005/09/philippine-call-centers.html