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.'"
Curse of the british hahaha (Score:5, Interesting)
and now india is not only becoming a superpower, but taking entire industries away from angloamerican sphere. talk about what goes around comes around.
Legal liabilty (Score:1, Interesting)
We need legislation that makes any company that uses overseas call centers - especially banks and credit bureaus - 100% liable for identity theft if it's from those centers - I don't what the circumstances.
Yeah, I know it won't happen: Congress is owned by the banks.
Re:in before the idiots (Score:5, Interesting)
I actually find that the gender neutral nature of the Visayan and Tagalog languages to be a mark of cultural superiority.
Basically, there is no differentiation between male and female in the language. Filipinos are always saying "his" or "he" when they mean to say "hers" or "she". So this is a language bias towards equality of the sexes, which carries over to being developmentally predisposed towards equal treatment between the sexes. It's a superior language construct. Unlike, for example, Japanese, which has entire verb classes dedicated to the deference of women and underlings to the male/ boss. English is not the worst offender on this topic.
Re:Curse of the british hahaha (Score:5, Interesting)
As opposed to what, some other language becoming the world language? As little as 20 years ago, knowing English was not that important. "Long distance calls" was something freakishly expensive, air travel fairly exotic and expensive, finding an English-language newspaper was only in specialty shops mostly for foreigners living abroad. Sure, for some limited fields in international trade, science or technology it could be important but in general it was not, which is why nobody speaks Latin anymore. People learned the languages of their bordering countries as that was what would get most use of.
With the Internet, it's become much more useful to know a "world language" and English has a pretty good head start. Granted the Internet is older but WWW didn't arrive until 1990 and it didn't grow big until the dotcom days. Not just for the job opportunities but because you actually can read international news, you can read the English Wikipedia - which is by far the biggest and best, you can talk to people all over the world cheaply and easily. With it, international trade and collaboration has exploded as people can actually work in distributed teams with email, video-conferencing, common source repositories and so on. The advantages are so big it'd happen some way.
In the short run, yes of course removing the language barriers are disadvantageous to some, but in the long run it's a huge benefit to mankind if we can collaborate as one. Languages have been sort of a natural protectionism, shielding us from international competition. What we in the west is really getting a taste of is the free market. And the US got the least reason of all to complain about that.
Filipino Call Centers (Score:4, Interesting)
First a disclaimer, my wife is an American citizen Filipino immigrant, who surprise, is a nurse! I interact with hundreds of Filipinos both in the USA and abroad on a pretty regular basis. Filipino's love to eat, so there are family friendly parties every week where they feast. There are no left overs, everyone takes something home with them. They cannot possibly get enough pork and they also eat a lot of seafood and rice. They love to sing and always seem to have a karaoke machine at those parties. They all mostly love America. Right after the Japanese bombed Perl Harbor, they bombed and invaded the Philippines (It was an American Coloney). General McArthur had to leave the Philippines when war was declared but he vowed to return to liberate the Philippines from the Japanese. He kept his promise.
Their accents are not bad at all and they all speak fluent english and many of them can speak spanish too! If they don't speak spanish, they can certainly understand 99% of it. The Philippines was a Spanish colony that the USA won in the Spanish American war. America is responsible for building all their public schools. Their nurses can come the USA and only have to pass the nursing exams. All their college credits are transferable as their schools meet the USA educational standards. It is true that many of them mix up masculine and feminine words that simply don't exist in their native languages. (His/Her, He/ She, etc.). There are millions of Filipino's in the USA. They are truly compassionate and highly skilled. You would be lucky to have a Filipino nurse as you will likely receive exceptional care and true compassion.
I feel it's about time that outsourcing moves from India to the Philippines. They certainly understand American culture and can speak American English. They have Christian names that you can pronounce. Most of them have a very strong work ethic and they are extremely polite and friendly. Communication is so much easier than with the Indians. More companies should be moving outsourced operations from India to the Philippines or just plain in-sourcing it back to the USA. All those tech savvy American students who cannot get a job, would jump all over a call center job. Course, turnover will always be high, no matter who does the work because it truly is a difficult job. But if a company must outsource than they should seriously consider the Philippines as one of the best to satisfy customers angry with Indian communications.
In regards to the articles comparison of the American dollar to the Filipino Peso, it is the dollar that is dropping like a rock, and the Peso is more stable. It is not the Philippines that has to worry about the exchange rate, it is America that should be worried.
A much better alternative (Score:2, Interesting)
Over the past 2 years my Australian based multinational has moved the internal help desk as well as some operations, DBA, networks teams and so on to Manila. The speed at which the place has grown (now employs 200+ people), the quality of the staff, their grasp of the english language and their attitude must be commended.
Compared to the alternatives, their accent is much easier to understand, they have much better analytical skills, won't try and save face (it's not in their culture to do so) and they won't promise the world up front but never deliver anything.
Compared to some local colleagues they can leave them for dead too. Just this week I had to deal with a young guy from Manila, and an old guy (been in the company 15 years) locally. You can imagine which one was quicker at setting things up, had a better attitude and left a much better impression. Couple that with 24hr support and it's hard to imagine why you wouldn't want to outsource some things to the Phillippines.
I was certainly apprehensive at first but am now a convert.