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
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!
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
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'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.
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).
What makes you think someone at an overseas call center is more likely to steal your identity than someone in the US?
Disclaimer: I work for a call center in a country other than the US.
No sig for the moment.
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.
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
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.
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
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