Slashdot Mirror
Philippines Call Centers Overtake India
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.'"
They used india as a colony, and while trying to inject their culture and keep indians occupied by making school kids memorize logarithmic tables (yes they really did that back in the earlier centuries), they also taught them english.
and now india is not only becoming a superpower, but taking entire industries away from angloamerican sphere. talk about what goes around comes around.
Read radical news here
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.
I had several colleagues from Philippines back in 1999 - 2000 and they spoke/wrote excellent English and were very nice people in my opinion.
The Phillipines employ more people in call centers than India.
Yet India earns 10 times as much in outsourcing.
How can that be?
AHA! I guess they mean that Indians are doing other stuff than answering the phone, like developing, looking at xrays, etc.
(Reminds me of the old joke where a kid is the son of a doctor, but the doctor is not his father. The doctor is his mother.)
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
I was a guest at Eastern Telecom's company beach resort in the northern part of country the some 15 years ago. As I waded into the nice surf, I snagged my foot on a cable.
"That's the country's only cable link to the outside world... goes to Hong Kong," explained one of the company guys.
I hope things are better now.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
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.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
the Philippines is a much smaller destination for outsourcing more broadly — India earns about 10 times as much revenue from outsourcing
Which figures, because India has more than 10 times the population of the Philippines.
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)
Why are US call centers base in SE Asia? I would think that there are enough countries in South America that are in roughly the same time zone as the US that could be call center havens. Doing so would enable everyone to be working at similar times and that issues that have to move up or down the hierarchy could be resolved sooner.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
AT&T recently moved at least their MIS department over to the Philippines. Call quality and assistance has gone down drastically. Which may be more AT&T's fault than anything else.
I automatically trust the Filipino call center drone more than his Indian counterpart.
...."
The Filipino doesn't start our conversation with what I know to be a lie.
"Hi, my name is Mike. How can I
Bullshit, man with a South Asian Accent. Your name is not Mike.
Irrational, I know, but I have a low level of contempt for the guy I'm speaking with when things start off that way. Has nothing to do with race or national origin.
I'm not sure how extensive they are or if TFA takes this into account, but it should be noted that all the Indian BPO majors have a presence in the Philippines.
I worked at an MCI IP relay call center some years ago. I remember that shortly before I quit, management was bragging about their new Filipino call center. They said people would walk for hours and hours to get to the work site in Manila, and sleep there overnight. Their efficiency was top-notch, apparently. And I guess they didn't have or didn't mind what I referred to as the "Anal Sex Hour," which happened when bored suburban teenagers (mostly from Texas, it seemed) would prank call their female classmates and have the relay operator sexually harass the call recipient over the phone. All anonymously. All without recourse. Between that and our friends from Nigeria, I'd had enough, and quit.
-- haaz.
Apple doesn't outsource call support jobs overseas and they've been number one in call center customer satisfaction for 12 years in a row. Coincidence?
I've certainly caught some phone drones who were either having a bad day, or were plain assholes; but overwhelmingly I find it hard to blame them, rather than the people behind them(who, unfortunately, I have no way of screaming obscenities at...)
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...
Sorry, I have to disagree. From my experience, the enunciation from those who speak Tagalog as a native language and ESL for tech support is much easier to understand. As well, (again, only within my personal experience) I found the Manilla call centers more willing to go the extra mile to resolve the problem at hand, even if it requires a call back from a more experience operator. It's not just scripting, they have people with intimate knowledge of the products. My two cents.
That sinking feeling deep in your gut when you KNOW you screwed up bad summed up with: {head desk} {head desk}
I'm very impressed by the voice recognition capabilities of Siri (and presumably other products like it). Its ability to UNDERSTAND what you are asking for of course has a lot of room for improvement.
Is that just a matter of time though? When will the simpler types of these jobs be eliminated? What about us slashdot posters, will I have to worry about being replaced by Siri 2.0? (ok maybe Siri 3.0).
Nothing against Indian call center workers, but I'm glad for this shift. My experiences with call centers in the Philippines have been dramatically better than my call centers in India. The accent, if present, is easier for an American to understand. I suspect that has to be with respective colonial relationships. The call center employees don't bullshit me by claiming to be Todd in Texas, they give me their real name and don't try to tell me they're local. They also don't get defensive when I'm pissed off. I suspect the companies there must be training their employees differently. Indian call centers seem far more aggressive...clearly run by MBAs. Plus, it is an economic break for a country that needs one.
The women from India mostly have faces that could stop a clock.
* make them memorise 100 technical questions/answers
Memorize? Scripts, scripts and more scripts. First line support is like the oral version of the diagnostic scripts for people too lazy to try reading or following them. A lot of the first line callers and first line support staff deserve each other...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Just wait until you call the Philippines. Currently, Siemens corporation outsources their IT support to the Philippines. The quality of their IT support is amazing, but not in a good way.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
First off, I never thought I'd see the day that my country and my industry would make it to slashdot's front page. :-)
I work in one of the biggest call centers in Manila as part of upper management (hence, this anonymous post). The growth here in the Philippines (of the call center industry) has been astonishing. For my span (total number of employees in my or my subordinates' control) alone, we grew by 1500% in 2 years. This year, projected revenue from outsourcing in the Philippines is projected at around a dozen billion US dollars.
The article is correct in stating that a typical Filipino will learn American English in first grade (pre-school, in most cases) and that he/she would probably have been indoctrinated in American culture as soon as they first watch Sesame Street or Spongebob in their formative years.
(This can be both good and bad. For the past few weeks, everybody at work can speak about nothing else except Breaking Dawn. And, as a sidenote, nerds here in the Philippines are almost indistinguishable from their American counterparts, they speak the same language (Klingon, included) and pursue similar pursuits and hobbies outside work and school.)
I truly believe the key to this growth is not just language and cultural indoctrination, as what TFA has stated.
First is the inherent culture and attitude. Typically, a Filipino will be extremely polite and accommodating almost to a fault. One of our recurring issues here are call center agents who keep saying "Sir" and "Ma'am" too much and apologize profusely, more so than is warranted. Compare this (and I say this with all due respect) to counterparts in other countries where call center agents have to be reminded to say "Thank you" every now and then. Another would be qualifications. Most Filipinos in the call center industry have, at the very least, a college degree. Finally, the most compelling characteristic, imho, is definitely the work ethic. It is not uncommon for my colleagues to work 12 hour days (without overtime pay) and still commute 2 hours to and from work. Add to that, call center employees, more often than not, work from 9pm to 5am to match US daylight hours. All this for a fraction of what our counterparts get in the west.
I am quite optimistic that our industry will continue to grow, even with if there is a clamor for jobs to stay Stateside and recent technologies such as Siri. There will always be a need for a human touch when a person picks up the telephone to ask for help. And, even if I am wont to say this, Filipinos are suited for this job, as their counterparts in the west don't seem to want it, or have a disdain for it.
First off, I never thought I'd see the day that my country and my industry would make it to slashdot's front page. :-)
I work in one of the biggest call centers in Manila as part of upper management (hence, this anonymous post). The growth here in the Philippines (of the call center industry) has been astonishing. For my span (total number of employees in my or my subordinates' control) alone, we grew by 1500% in 2 years. This year, projected revenue from outsourcing in the Philippines is projected at around a dozen billion US dollars.
The article is correct in stating that a typical Filipino will learn American English in first grade (pre-school, in most cases) and that he/she would probably have been indoctrinated in American culture as soon as they first watch Sesame Street or Spongebob in their formative years.
(This can be both good and bad. For the past few weeks, everybody at work can speak about nothing else except Breaking Dawn. And, as a sidenote, nerds here in the Philippines are almost indistinguishable from their American counterparts, they speak the same language (Klingon, included) and pursue similar pursuits and hobbies outside work and school.)
I truly believe the key to this growth is not just language and cultural indoctrination, as what TFA has stated.
First is the inherent culture and attitude. Typically, a Filipino will be extremely polite and accommodating almost to a fault. One of our recurring issues here are call center agents who keep saying "Sir" and "Ma'am" too much and apologize profusely, more so than is warranted. Compare this (and I say this with all due respect) to counterparts in other countries where call center agents have to be reminded to say "Thank you" every now and then. Another would be qualifications. Most Filipinos in the call center industry have, at the very least, a college degree. Finally, the most compelling characteristic, imho, is definitely the work ethic. It is not uncommon for my colleagues to work 12 hour days (without overtime pay) and still commute 2 hours to and from work. Add to that, call center employees, more often than not, work from 9pm to 5am to match US daylight hours. All this for a fraction of what our counterparts get in the west.
I am quite optimistic that our industry will continue to grow, even with if there is a clamor for jobs to stay Stateside and recent technologies such as Siri. There will always be a need for a human touch when a person picks up the telephone to ask for help. And, even if I am wont to say this, Filipinos are suited for this job, as their counterparts in the west don't seem to want it, or have a disdain for it.
India (the world's next superpower as we're all suppose to know) is engaged in a heroic struggle against the old world powers to claim its legitimate place the the upper echelon of international prestige. By all indications it's surged ahead of such established old world heavy weights such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan,...Unfortunately, it ran straight into the ultra advanced, ultra competitive Filipinos, and came out second best for the first time in recent memory.
in short, to people with Anglophile backgrounds, Filipino names are just plain wacky:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/9435751.stm
my favorite is the very influential previous archbishop of the Philippines: Cardinal Sin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Sin
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
India said, some time ago, that they want to be out of the call center business. Indians want to work as developers, architects, analysts, managers, and the like. And who could blame them? Who wants to get an engineering degree for a career in a call center?
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.
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.
Siemens sold their IT Solutions and Services division to ATOS recently. The US ATOS call center is in Ohio. It all comes down to the information and freedom provided to the call center staff. If you give them a script and you are overly strict with the staff, you end up with a slave driven environment where they are not allowed to deviate from the script. If you don't actually train the staff to trouble-shoot and think for themselves, then you get horrific results. Don't blame the crap support you receive, blame your own company for accepting offshore support and blame your IT department for not giving the tech's the training they require.
Outsourcing can work if managed properly, but all too often it is mis-managed to keep costs as cheap as possible. IT support is not considered essential by the business because it generates zero income. What the business needs to understand is the costs of lost productivity to their main workforce that is making money. If every worker has a computer problem that requires 15 calls to the helpless help desk with zero resolution and multiple days / weeks of downtime then they will consider spending more. It all boils down to IT generating accurate metrics that mean something to the business. We spent more outsourcing with another firm than we did doing it ourselves. The micro-charges really add up! Making sure the contract is solid is difficult, time consuming and expensive. Lawyers don't understand IT and bottom line costs are deceptive. Manage your own infrastructure and outsource the no brainer jobs but keep the real talent in house.
I can't say I disagree with you. They buy the services of these smart people, and then don't let them be smart. It happens to Indian technical support too, as far as I can tell. A script isn't a substitute for a thinking person on the other end of the phone.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I wouldn't have even been able to start with the company today without moving overseas and working for peanuts
the quality of life afforded by your wage in i.t. in an outsourcing country while living there, could far surpass your quality of life in the middle of your junior-senior phase in america.
"rob from Peter to pay Paul" game of musical chairs where you try to poach from other groups.
that's capitalism. get whatever you can at any cost, profit as much as you can in the short run so investors will be pleased, and refrain from giving anything you can.
Read radical news here
I see a lot (given the small percentage they are of the population) of Filipino nanny and personal support worker types here in the west.
I would hazard to guess they even outnumber (outright not just percentage) the majority whites in these occupations.
Thanks to Brit colonization, India is now the world's largest democracy. Its common language is a particularly humorous dialect of English, which makes for occasional hilarious misunderstandings. Not sure what you mean by 'injecting' their culture, although one may argue that Indian popular culture is broadly a caricature of their former colonial masters, sometimes more successful than the source ( cricket anyone?). Yeah, India and China are ascendant, rising on the cresting tide of their populations. Let's see how that works out for them ;)
ask them if they like "balut".
I take it to be a mark of gender confusion or irrelevance. Most European languages are strongly gendered. Bastardized patois/pidgins ( and English) less so, as a result of necessary compromise between accuracy and range, as it generally happens with trade languages. It has little to do with a 'bias towards equality of the sexes' - there are few societies with stronger patriarchal macho stereotypes than the Filipinos...when it comes to cultural superiority, where is the Tagalog literature to rival merely the Latin or Greek classics? How exactly is 'cultural superiority' of non-gendered cultures expressed? Compared to merely the Japanese, regardless your irrelevancies about socialized submission incarnated in verb classes, how does cultural output of the Philippines compare? I find your conclusions premature and your construction jejune.
The STOCK MARKET! Greed, demanding greater profits, & the boards of directors "come down" on mgt. who merely responds in the easiest & fastest manner possible - PAYROLL CONTROL! 1st by downsizing, & then by outsourcing/offshoring.
Problem is, it 'bites the home nation' (in this case, the USA) in the foot in the end via higher unemployment, less taxpayers, & less "economy", which is merely MONEY SWITCHING HANDS, due to folks having less disposable income (monies beyond necessities such as food, utilities, & shelter)!
That's when you then start seeing "fun businesses" like film theaters, restaurants & bars die, first, & then their suppliers, until it comes back around to EVERYONE CONCERNED.
Simply because "economies" are merely Peter, Paying Paul, paying Henry etc. until it comes home to bite you in the behind (mainly the "non-1%-ers" FORMERLY WORKING MIDDLE CLASS).
in reply to your post:
"methinks the lady doth protest to much"
a great quote. from shakespeare. a significant luminary light in the prodigious cultural output of England. and someone who would not be so insecure and hot tempered about a simple harmless assertion of a culture from the distant seas
there is something wrong with someone who feels a hostile need to put other cultures "in their places." it speaks of your own personal insecurities, and doesn't reflect well on your cultural identity, to be a product of that culture which such a big chip on your shoulder
so say what you want about the philippines and it's culture, if such denigration makes you feel better. i don't think filipinos will be upset. filipinos tend to be pretty relaxed and secure in their cultural identity. something you obviously need. something your culture failed to instill in you. i'm sorry, but you're not a very good reflection on your upbringing
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
How much does it cost for criminal interests to bribe a call center employee or manager in America? How about India?
And how does the FBI expect to prosecute someone in India for stealing Americans' personal information?
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
At least for customer facing jobs. Their English tends to be way, way more understandable. They can do customer service without promising things they cannot deliver. I'd be curious to see how they do in infrastructure management, something else which the Indians I've worked with have not made the best impression
>> India earns about 10 times as much revenue from outsourcing.
Should be compared per capita basis, as India's population is about 10 times the size of Philipines.
Not at all! I can understand a Filipino much better than an ...well I wont go there. :p
It is really interesting to see them taken aback and sometimes lose their place in their script.
Visvyan speakers for me are even easier to understand as Visvyan is closer to Spanish.
But to us non-Americans, Filipinos sound like Americans with Asian voices. Which is miles easier to understand then the average Indian. No offence to the Indians, but they have a very thick accent. So I think more Philippine call centres is a good thing (TM). Those of us who've been to the Phils have noticed a very big American influence on almost everything in the Philippines, most Tagalog speakers dont speak pure Tagalog, they speak a mix of English and Tagalog and are conversant in both languages.
I have to agree with this as well.
Most Asian cultures have a culture against saying no. Indians, Indonesians, Thais, they will always answer "yes" and it's up to the listener to determine if it's "yes I can" or "yes I cant". Filipinos have less of a problem with this (again, probably due to the American influence). Filipino's are willing to be more up front and have less of a fear of offending people which means they are more willing to say what they are thinking instead of what they think you want to hear.
Probably the best call centres are run out of Malaysia, they have a very easy to understand accent (based on British English) and a lot of highly skilled workers. The downside is that you have to pay Malay's more then Filipinos.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
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
These two things are the worst problem with any call centre. Even when dealing with Australians (I'm Australian, Aussie banks have to have an Aussie call centre IIRC) having a crackling line with a weak microphone makes someone I could ordinarily understand difficult just to hear.
Add a strong accent (we get a lot of Irish/Scottish/Geordies in Oz these days) and they are impossible to understand.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
If there is any justice in the world, people all over India are pulling their fucking hair out and screaming obscenities, because when they call to get tech support someone is speaking broken Hindi, Pushto, and Urdo on the other end of the phone.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Visvyan speakers for me are even easier to understand as Visvyan is closer to Spanish.
You mean Visayan. Locally known as Bisaya` --- the central and southern languages.
First off, there are hundreds of languages (and dialects) in the Philippines, and this is probably because of geographic reasons (there are 7,107 islands). The official language is Filipino w/c is just Tagalog. This is mostly spoken in the northern mainland, Luzon and the National Capital Region (NCR), and those nearby regions, and is the language used in national TV, and the language taught in school. Over time, there have been lots of borrowed words from the other southern languages/dialects, and this is probably because the people up north realize that they are not the center of everything in our country/culture! I laugh at certain Bisaya` words being used on TV, now they 'get it'.
Anyways, Tagalog/Filipino and Bisaya` are very very different . And yes there are Spanish words we use. La meza (table). Uno, dos, tres, quatro, singko, saiz (1-6). De mano (turn right).
Back to the topic at hand, English has been taught in school since grade school as well as, well, Tagalog. But a lot of Visayans cringe at Tagalog for a lot of reasons (whether personal or political). Visayans prefer English probably because its easier to comprehend, maybe for economic reasons (you get some respect if you speak and write fluent English, aside from speaking/writing your own native tongue). Believe it or not I've been to Manila on official business trips a few times and though I can speak Tagalog, its very broken and has a distinguishable accent I very much prefer to talk in English. I've met a few folks there who even ask if I understand Tagalog and whether I was really born here. Yes I am ;-)
-- Posted by a Cebuano. Bisaya` ko dong. Ang balay ni libay libat (L0L)
- Hello, you've called Dell technical support in Manila, my name is Bala. How can I help you?
- What are you wearing?