sia figures to be the high-growth
region for call center activity for years to come by most accounts, as
companies continue to offshore operations in India and the Philippines
and head to China to serve the local market.
A recent Datamonitor report predicts the number of
call centers in the Asia-Pacific region will grow at a compound annual
growth rate of 14.3 percent, surpassing 17,000 by 2008. Datamonitor believes
call center dynamics in the region will continue to be influenced by labor
costs in India and the Philippines and increasingly in Malaysia and China.
While China does not have a critical mass of English speakers, that will
change by 2008, Datamonitor says.
David Ross, project manager for ITESA, a New York?based
call center and business process outsourcing firm, says the top reasons
for a company to site call center operations in Asia are to:
Ross says China is getting more looks these days
as the nation is awash with infrastructure improvements and construction
in preparation for the 2008 Olympics.
“China has an incredibly large and growing middle
class and the service market is increasingly more competitive,” says
Keith Fiveson, ITESA’s founder. Fiveson says China has 45,000 to 65,000
call center agents by varying estimates, a small percentage compared
to the more than 3 million call centers in the U.S. So the Asian market
is both immature and fertile, say Fiveson and Ross.
“In the next 10 to 15 years, more than 50 percent
of the U.S. population will be over 55,” Ross says. “Today in India,
more than 500 million are under 25, so if we take a look at demographics,
we are at the beginning of a major shift in economies. China is really
where India was nine years ago,” Fiveson says. “There are more people
learning English in China now than there are in the U.S.”
Says Ross, “India and the Philippines are good
plays for back office/front office support for call center operations
out of the U.S. China is much more multinational. Companies are much
more likely to go there to follow their customers.”
There are other choices in the region. Australia,
with 146,000 call center seats, is an option for companies looking
at serving North America. For labor costs, Ross likens Australia to
Canada. Also, more than 100 different languages are spoken in Australia,
offering great flexibility.
Malaysia has labor-cost similarities to China,
the ITESA executives say. It can support service to China as well
as English-speaking populations and has a high literacy rate.
Fiveson says offshoring is appealing to companies
in debt and in need of lowering their cost structures and technology
is making this possible.
“We’ve just started to see the beginning of this
phenomenon we are calling globalization,” Fiveson says. “With greater
bandwidth and the lowering of bandwidth costs, the ability is there
to send information and voice calls to areas that were unreachable
10 years ago. It costs nothing to make a call to India.”
While India still rules among Asian countries
serving North America, the Philippines is advancing rapidly, says
Dave Shapiro, senior vice president of international business development
for Toronto-based Minacs, which provides
contact center services to companies in a variety of business sectors.
Shapiro is currently in the midst of site searches
in the Philippines and China for centers. Minacs is looking for
a 100- to 150-seat site expandable to 800-1,000 in the Philippines,
while plans in China call for a small, pilot operation starting
with 25 and eventually growing to 2,000.
“The Philippines, as opposed to India, has
a much more North America-centric culture,” Shapiro says. “The accent
is not as thick, the way of doing business is much more like America
and their sports and media are similar. Their favorite sport is
basketball.”
Shapiro says firms considering the Philippines
for a call center should look at the country’s 96 special economic
zones overseen by the Philippines Economic Zone Authority (PEZA).
These zones offer tax breaks and other incentives.
With a 12-hour time difference from the Eastern
U.S., Philippine call center workers wind up working all night long,
so proximity to transportation systems and 24-hour restaurants is
important, Shapiro says, adding that there is a lot of commerce
surrounding these zones.
In China, larger cities such as Shanghai and
Beijing are the usual targets, Shapiro says. Locations in the northeast
offer multi-language workers who can serve Korean and Japanese markets.
Companies look at China for China’s sake, he says, with centers
serving the domestic market there.
One of the latest to open in the Philippines
is Omaha-based SITEL, an outsourcer of customer support services.
The site is located in the first IT business park within the Quezon
City district of Manila, is wholly owned by SITEL and serves global
markets. 