BPO firm bullish of Cebu’s talent pool, expands facility

After having established a 500-seat facility here in the province last year, Accenture, a global business process outsourcing company has expanded its roster of services after seeing the huge potential of Cebu’s rich pool of manpower.

Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company with over 178, 000 people in 49 countries around the globe. The firm generated net revenue of about 19.7 billion US dollars for their fiscal year that ended last August 31, 2007.

On a press briefing held recently, two top executives from the firm announced Accenture’s expansion in its Cebu facility which now would include BPO services such as customer contact operations.

 “As a pioneer in the offshore industry, we want to leverage the Philippines for offshore works with our wide and diversified range of services so we can support the employment generation of the locals,” said Accenture’s global managing director for its Delivery Center Network for BPO Pankaj Vaish.

Vaish pointed out that Accenture has expanded services across the world like management consulting, technical systems integration, customer service, application outsourcing, business process outsourcing, and integrated outsourcing serving clients which are among two-thirds of the global Fortune 500 companies and 90 companies among the Fortune 100.

He said that 40% which amounts to eight billion US dollars of their 20 billion US dollar revenues could be accounted for their outsourcing services. In fact as for their December 2007 to February 2008 operations alone, they were able to earn outsourcing revenues worth 2.25 billion US dollars.

“All our services began in a small scale then it grew and became a fabric of our business. Here in our Cebu facility, we will be serving one client for our customer contact segment to be very focus on growing that client before we serve more,” added Vaish.

Focus on growing their Cebu facility first before looking at other growth areas in the country, Vaish said that they will, “make Cebu successful and grow Cebu like what we did in India wherein we grow in one city and eventually grown in other cities as well.”

Vaish said that in terms of talents, Cebu practically has all the necessary qualifications that their clients demand. “The Philippines has a strong growth potential so we make sure we are present where the talents are and Cebu is an attractive location, it has quality manpower skills, government support and an established industry geared to support our business and these are key dimensions enabling us to grow,” he stressed.

Their customer service contact operations which belong to the voice segment of their services will be similar to Manila, said Vaish. Currently, Accenture’s Cebu facility has 500 seats and they are looking for agents and non-agents position to fill in their management staff. Vaish said that they will be having a demand-driven base hiring to attract the talents with good voice skills, customer service orientation and management skills for specialized positions.

Realizing that offshoring and outsourcing has already become a talent game, Vaish said that other than salary proposition they offer an over-all value proposition to their employees so their off shoring and outsourcing business is considered as “driven by talents.”

“We are committed to growth and we will continue to invest especially on our people to drive growth and we will add more investments as we grow to deliver demanded services to our clients,” he added.