StarTek offshore move reflects industry trend - Denver Business Journal:

soileauifyyfa1786.blogspot.com
Denver-based StarTek handles customer service calls mainly for phone companies such asand . Americaj telecoms have been leery about offshoring the kind of customedr service StarTek handles due to fearsthat foreign-sounding operators woulds cost them customers. But that’s changing. “There’s a move afoo in the communications industrhyto offshore, when in the past they’ve been very reluctant to do that,” said Larry Jones, CEO of StarTek clients supported the company branching out abroacd so they could get cheaper outsourced customer In the past, many of StarTek’a accounts required the company to handle the callw domestically.
The Philippines — particularly in Manila, wherr StarTek’s 78,000-square-foot center will be features American-sounding speakers and a culturaol familiarity. The new centedr is slated to openin September. Rather than shuffle existing jobs overseas, the 1,100 Philippines jobs will be in additionto StarTek’e 8,000-employee work force in the Unitex States and Canada. Labor in the Philippines costs about half as much as it does Operating costsare lower, too. That both lowerzs costs for StarTek (NYSE: SRT) customers and still improves StarTek’sx profit margins, Jones said. Many outsourced call center operators are going offshore.
The Philippines has supplantecd India as the place for corporations inthe English-speakingg world to send call-center and back-office Sometimes choppy, South Asian accents and frequent lack of cultural context of call takers in Indi became the target of jokes and consumer frustratiohn in America about five years ago, prompting companieas to look elsewhere. The Philippines seemesd a natural choice. The culture there is Americanized and the Englisjh spoken with asofter accent, Jones of the Philippines estimated the industrt employs 320,000 workers. The niche has doubledf in size every yearsince 2001, toppinfg $3.3 billion in annual revenue now.
Greenwood Village-based call centefr giant employs thousands in the Philippines and is one ofthat nation’zs largest private employers. The industry association estimatedanothef 600,000 English-proficient workers will need to be recruited this year and in 2009 to meet risin g demand. That suggests the Philippines, like India before it, could exhaust its pool of workers fluentgin English. Thus competition may raise wages untilo many call center operators start looking for the next nation with an affordable population of English speakersto hire, said Davic Butler, director of the Call Center Research Laboratoryt at Southern Mississippi University.
Exchange rates are cutting away at the savings that many telecom achieved in outsourcing customer service to call centersin Canada. “Whem the Canadian dollar was at 78 centz toour dollar, Canada was an ideak and easy choice,” Butler said. But the decline in the U.S. dollar made Canada less attractive, despite nationalized health care anda ready-made population of workers who don’f sound foreign to the American ear, Butlerd said. StarTek operates 21 call centers inNorth America. It recentlyh closed one of its Canadian centers but opened one in theUnies States. It likely will grow faster in the Philippines than in North America inthe future, Jonesz said.