MANILA, Philippines – inContact, the market leader in on-demand call center software and agent optimization tools, announced yesterday that it is expanding its operations in the Philippines.
Company officials noted that the timing of inContact’s expansion is perfect as cloud-based, or software-as-a-service (SaaS), offerings are rapidly growing in popularity across the customer service industry.
According to industry analyst firm Gartner, at least 75 percent of customer service centers will use some form of SaaS application as a part of the contact center solution by 2013. Another analyst firm, Ovum, has said that, given the new investment philosophy, a growing number of enterprises are looking towards hosted contact center services to reduce capital outlay and to access a wide range of technology options.
“We are excited to bring our leading edge cloud-based offering to the Philippines to enable customers to operate more efficiently, optimize the cost and quality of every interaction, create new pathways to profit, and ensure ongoing business improvement and growth,” inContact chief executive officer Paul Jarman said.
He explained that inContact’s cloud-based solutions give business process outsourcing (BPO) operators an extraordinary competitive advantage, as evidenced by their initial success in the Philippine market.
“We have been working with several outsourcers over the past several months, and are excited to have a physical office presence here now. The BPO market is highly competitive and client dissatisfaction and low margins can be the end of an outsourcer’s business. Our powerful portfolio of scalable, flexible, pay-as-you-go cloud-based call center outsourcing solutions enable BPOs to better manage their talent, reduce non-billable hours, increase revenue per call, and differentiate their service offering. In short, we help them create profitable customer experiences,” he pointed out.
He said inContact cloud-based solutions are perfectly suited to help meet the service and profitability goals of BPOs worldwide, and particularly those in the Philippines, that need to rapidly scale as the market grows.
inContact opened a new Manila office to support existing customers in the country, as well as the five new customers the company won since expanding operations in the country.
Citing data from the Contact Center Association of the Philippines (CCAP), the Commission on Communications and Information Technology (CICT) said the Philippine market has seen exponential growth over the past few years with 446,000 call center agent seats in 2009, of which approximately 90 percent handle calls that originate from the United States.
The market is projected to grow to $9 billion in 2010. With the rapid growth of the market in the Philippines, the country is perfectly suited as inContact’s gateway to Asia and the first location for its international expansion.
“inContact’s technology is a very well-rounded, integrated and robust solution that was infinitely more scalable and less expensive than any premise-based system. inContact is a perfect solution for BPOs because ultimately it enables us to deliver more for our clients’ customers, and that’s what’s really important for us,” according to Paul Flannery, CEO of Vector BPO, a full-service contact center based in the Philippines.
The inContact platform combines call routing, workforce optimization and network connectivity solutions with a powerful workflow between the subsystems, making it a very powerful tool for BPOs. Additionally, the platform boasts enterprise-class security, reliability, availability, and the industry’s best uptime guarantee of 99.99 percent. Unlike premise-based solutions, the inContact platform enables BPOs to scale up and down as their business dictates, making it a perfect technology match for their dynamic business model.