Whether startup or Fortune 500 corporation, companies of all sizes and industries have been outsourcing their BPO requirements to the Philippines for more than two decades. With a young population that’s highly proficient in the English language, the country’s talented workforce has made the Philippines one of the world’s largest and leading business process outsourcing (BPO) destinations.
“With multinational organisations such as Amazon, Facebook, American Express and Verizon having set up shop in Manila, the success of the Philippines’ BPO industry has not gone unnoticed. It has also paved the way for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to outsource their BPO requirements to third-party providers in the Philippines,” says Ralf Ellspermann, CEO of PITON-Global, an award-winning BPO in the Philippines.
According to Ellspermann, aside from the Philippines’ proficiency in English and large pool of highly qualified agents, the country also has a close cultural affinity with the West while offering a lower cost of labour (by around 70 per cent lower than in the UK). Most business processes in the country are also closely patterned after those found in the West.
But while the Philippines has become famous for its call centre services – they comprise 70 per cent of the BPO industry – the country also offers a wider array of back-office services, which many people might not be aware of despite the big names involved. These include business analytics, which is being done for Deutsche Knowledge Services; content moderation, for the likes of social media giant Facebook; fraud monitoring and detection, which serves financial institutions such as HSBC; application development, utilised by companies such as American Express; and even animation development for film studios such as Pixar.
And according to Ellspermann, about 60 per cent of all outsourcing services are being provided for companies in the technology, financial services, healthcare, e-commerce, social media, and on-demand industries – a testament to the diversity of outsourcing talent in the Philippines, which PITON-Global also offers, at half the cost of ‘onshore’ outsourcing providers.
On top all of the country’s strengths, nothing can beat the Philippines’ 20 years of experience in the contact centre and back-office outsourcing industry, which has helped shape the BPO powerhouse that it is today. Whether it’s a single-seat requirement or several thousand, the Philippines’ shores are, undoubtedly, where outsourcing talent abounds.
“Today there’s hardly any business process that can’t be outsourced to the Philippines. It’s not just BPO, but also KPO services that we can provide. Our objective, as a company, is to offer high-value services that require highly educated, skilled and experienced agents that can’t easily be found in the UK,” explains Ellspermann.
