Philippines Call Centers Overtake India 165
New submitter ajitk writes "This year, call centers in the Philippines employed 50,000 more people than those in India. From the New York Times article: '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 centers here, or built their own. ... Nevertheless, the financial benefits of outsourcing remain strong enough that the call center business is growing at 25 to 30 percent a year here in the Philippines, compared to 10 to 15 percent in India. In spite of its recent growth, the Philippines is a much smaller destination for outsourcing more broadly — India earns about 10 times as much revenue from outsourcing.'"
Re:My experience with Philippines (Score:5, Insightful)
I work with a number of Filipinos on a daily basis - some of them are quite fluent, others less so.
The times I have worked with Philippines-based call centers (Adobe, I'm looking at YOU you slimy parthogenic mutant spawn of a perverted invertebrate) between the poor connection, the very limited knowledge that the person had and the accent, I had a very, very unpleasant experience. The employees were, however, unfailingly polite.
It's not so much the language barrier, although at times that is a problem - it's the whole concept of a complex, poorly thought out, poorly executed process that makes my blood pressure go up every time I even think about calling.
Which may be exactly how they planned it.
in before the idiots (Score:5, Insightful)
1. The USA is popular in the Philippines. So be nice to Filipinos. Saying lame jokes about sex tourism and mixing "f"s and "p"s just makes you an asshole, and continues the worst stereotypical impressions of ugly Americans abroad. Be nice or shut the fuck up.
2. Those working in the call centers will usually speak perfect idiomatic American English. No Taglish (Tagalog and English) or "promdi" ("from the province").
2. If you sense the slight Filipino accent, say "mabuhay" (hello) and "salamat" (thank you). It will be sly and appreciated, and you'll probably get better help.
4. If you don't like the idea of jobs going to Filipinos that should go to Americans, then point your anger at the American Corporation who moved the call center there, not the person on the phone, they didn't make the decision.
And then finally, point your anger at yourself: Americans will get expensive degrees in French poetry, then work at McDonalds with hefty student loans. Filipinos will major in nursing, get fast tracked to entry to the USA, get a signing bonus and a fabulous salary and the chance to work wherever they want. Because there is a shortage of nurses in the USA. Because Americans don't want to touch bedpans.
The enemy is yourself and your bad attitude, not the hardworking and the good people from the Philippines.
Now bring in the typical, inevitable, ugly American stupidity in the comments.
Re:Curse of the british hahaha (Score:3, Insightful)
Tell that to the 8-10% of the unemployed in your country.
Re:*SIGH* (Score:5, Insightful)
I usually find the problem to be in the other direction and not necessarily due to foreign accents. The universal recipe for a support centre is:
* find the cheapest voip provider
* find the cheapest headsets
* find people who claim to speak engrish/taglish/mangrish
* make them memorise 100 technical questions/answers and 1000 salespitches for additional services
* pay them 2 peanuts a month (to make them really enthusiastic)
Re:in before the idiots (Score:4, Insightful)
As someone who has and still works in the call center industry, let me say that it's not about Americans not wanting call center jobs, it's about the costs of low level call center work. For example, if you're a credit card company, you can train a low-wage non-American to do the simple stuff like tell you your balance and available credit, accept a payment, or reissue you another card. But the more complicated stuff will come back on-shore in smaller call centers. Things like credit card disputes, fraud management, and more common sales work.
It's not about finding just cheap labor, but about finding cheap specialized labor. The best part about offshoring is the added benefit of attracting highly skilled and intelligent workers on the cheap. But add American and British culture in the mix and it becomes a little more difficult for the really cheap labor from degree holding Indians or Filipinos to understand cultural cues. It's part of the reason why those who make the mistake of placing Level 3 support in these countries where cultural miscommunication occurs through lack of training and little value of the customer's time causes offshoring to have a bad name.
Re:*SIGH* (Score:5, Insightful)
Universally, their English is substantially better than my whatever-it-is-they-speak-there, and given that it is entirely unexpected in low-end phone support for the support guy to have nothing but the script he was given(ie. no access to the product to poke at, much less in the configuration I'm calling about) a fair amount of cluelessness is understandable.
Now, as for the people with actual decision-making power who decided that this flavor of tech support is good enough, may they be doomed to transcribe the entire library of babel, twice over, while a guy with an incomprehensible accent on the far end of a tin-cans-and-string VOIP link bellows it one character at a time in an ideosyncratic variant of the NATO phonetic alphabet...
Re:*SIGH* (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Curse of the british hahaha (Score:2, Insightful)
You think it's funny but...
Several of my friends and I got into the American tech industry by answering the phones. We then worked our way up. If we were starting out today, we'd have to start somewhere else, because the path we took into living wage jobs has been moved overseas.
Re:Curse of the british hahaha (Score:5, Insightful)