RP to benefit from growth in offshore outsourcing

Business process outsourcing (BPO) will keep growing for years as consumers require ever-increasing and ever more complex services from companies and the market will be large enough for India and the Philippines combined, two of the hottest sites competing for offshore outsourcing business.

Vikas Kapoor, president and chief executive officer of Intellirisk Management Corp., a leading service provider in the US for organizations with complex customer service needs, said BPO is not "a bubble that will burst," but a global market that will continue expanding as constant product and service innovation by companies drive the need for customer services.

The Columbus, Ohio company is expanding into Asia and has chosen the Philippines as one of two sites in which to set up, impressed with the country’s talent pool and technology infrastructure. It will be opening a call center in Metro Manila in September or October, with about 500 call center agents in place within the year.

"I’m happy to have the cost advantage, but the primary thing I’m looking for is an improvement in the quality and caliber of our communications with our clients," said Kapoor. "So it’s very important for me to access sophisticated technology talent and sophisticated analytics talent and then apply it through sophisticated technology in the call center."

"The call center will be at the higher end of the value chain, employing the most sophisticated techniques in customer information analysis, including a proprietary system called Karma," he said.

Intellirisk will set up an "analytics" team that would use information from client companies to predict when a customer is likely to get into payments difficulty, and determine what actions to take to help them out.

"We will in our industry be the first company to create this operation in the Philippines," Kapoor said. "And one of the reasons that I am starting out with a pilot is I want to perfect the process before we expand it."

During his visit to the Philippines last week, Kapoor toured facilities in the Clark and Subic economic zones and in Cebu. He even listened in on some of the calls and found the quality of customer handling to be very high.

"One place where I think the Philippines has a distinct advantage is that the people are culturally more familiar with American situations," he said. "And the technology and infrastructure is as good as anywhere in the world."

Some Intellirisk clients were encouraging the company to set up in Manila. One American call center in particular had even provided an option in its service allowing callers to press ‘2’ if they wanted the call to be handled in Manila. Number 2 is the choice of customers 80 percent of the time, Kapoor said.

"The American consumer is seeing a quality improvement by having their call handled in the Philippines," he said. "I believe it’s very important for us and for other companies to focus on that quality improvement and less on the cost or price of the service."

Intellirisk controls about 10 percent of the US accounts receivables market. It has 22 call centers in the US and Canada, plus two in the United Kingdom, employing a total of 6,000 people and generating annual revenues of $300 million. Operations involve financial institutions, telecommunications companies, cable companies, health care providers, utilities and governments.