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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.'"
I work with a number of Filipinos on a daily basis - some of them are quite fluent, others less so.
The times I have worked with Philippines-based call centers (Adobe, I'm looking at YOU you slimy parthogenic mutant spawn of a perverted invertebrate) between the poor connection, the very limited knowledge that the person had and the accent, I had a very, very unpleasant experience. The employees were, however, unfailingly polite.
It's not so much the language barrier, although at times that is a problem - it's the whole concept of a complex, poorly thought out, poorly executed process that makes my blood pressure go up every time I even think about calling.
Which may be exactly how they planned it.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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
Tell that to the 8-10% of the unemployed in your country.
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)
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}
You think it's funny but...
Several of my friends and I got into the American tech industry by answering the phones. We then worked our way up. If we were starting out today, we'd have to start somewhere else, because the path we took into living wage jobs has been moved overseas.
You know, you hit the nail on the head. I have 21 years with my company and I personally started on a help line for Point Of Sale equipment in the Credit Card dept (proprietary card), moved from there to LAN administrator, and on to programming and system images. That POS help line? It is in Manila now. The Credit Card department? Outsourced. Oh, there is still a card with our company name on it. It just isn't handled at all by our company anymore. I wouldn't have even been able to start with the company today without moving overseas and working for peanuts. Low Cost Geography they euphemistically call it. In the same way those of us who are technical experts in the design departments no longer have any internal source to draw on for new hires. The lower end jobs where the best of the workers could have moved up are all overseas. The middle of the road jobs are mostly gone too. It's only the top end design groups that are left in the US. And we have nobody to pull from when folks retire, switch jobs, or get laid off. We supposedly hire from colleges, but those that come in are woefully unprepared. They would have been fine after spending a couple of years in those middle tier jobs - but they just don't cut it for the ones where you need a lot of experience. They will someday, but not right away. It makes long term succession planning for your group more a "rob from Peter to pay Paul" game of musical chairs where you try to poach from other groups.