With the Australian economy still reeling from the blow dealt by the COVID-19 pandemic, cost-cutting measures will be vital to organisations’ survival—and they will need to be implemented as soon as possible.
Outsourcing call centre services to countries such as the Philippines is one efficient way to achieve this goal. As the world’s largest and leading outsourcing destination for contact centre services, the country’s low labour cost combined with its pool of highly skilled agents is arguably motivation enough for Australian companies to migrate their call centre requirements to third-party providers in the Philippines.
But if that is not enough, then consider these other advantages: Having been born and raised in the third-largest English-speaking country in the world, Filipinos are outstandingly proficient in the English language, making communication with Australian customers seamless and highly efficient.
A clear testament to the country’s ability to offer world-class contact centre services is the fact that globally leading brands such as Amazon, Google, Facebook, and American Express have been outsourcing their front and back-office requirements to the Philippines for many years, says Ralf Ellspermann, PITON-Global, one of the leading mid-sized call centres in the Philippines.
“The large majority of contact centre services, especially for Fortune 500 clients, are provided on a 24/7 basis and include both voice and non-voice processes,” says Ellspermann, whose company has been awarded for excellence and leadership in the outsourcing industry.
He identifies some of the multitude of services being offered by call centres in the Philippines: customer support, which includes customer service; help desk and tech support over the phone, via email, or through web chat; customer acquisition, which includes lead generation and telemarketing; and back-office support, which includes claims processing and enterprise data management.
These services are just a few of the more popular ones, and Ellspermann emphasizes that there are more that companies such as PITON-Global can—and are ready to—offer Australian businesses.
One particularly interesting service that call centres in the Philippines offer is multilingual support. While definitely the best at outsourced English-speaking call centre services, the country has also become home to agents who speak a large number of Asian and even European languages. Such employees, says Ellspermann, make up 5% of the BPO workforce, which translates to roughly 60,000 agents—and half of them are native speakers who have decided to make the Philippines their home.
The new normal is upon us, and with it comes the reality that some costs just need to be cut in order to weather this global crisis. Consider that your company’s best ally when trying to overcome the impact of COVID-19 may well be over 6,000 kilometers away, in the call centre outsourcing capital of the world: the Philippines.