Call center firms keep up through constant trainings

CEBU, Philippines — The robust call center industry in the Philippines is catching up with the paradigm shift in terms of service as Artificial Intelligence is slowly taking over voice-related jobs.

This prompted call center companies to invest more aggressively on constant trainings and upscaling investments to their manpower pool to cope with higher-value job assignments.

A survey conducted by the Contact Center Association of the Philippines (CCAP) entitled "Job Complexity Survey," confirmed that there is an ongoing shift in contact centers’ business models and evolution of agents’ jobs, as reflected in the nature of current job tasks.

 Of those agents who are doing voice jobs, only 14 percent are engaged in low-skill tasks. Such traditional voice-job responsibilities include telemarketing, order taking, and provision of simple customer service assistance.

Those engaged in jobs requiring middle-level skills comprises of 51percent of the respondents. Their job tasks range from providing solutions to customers’ problems, processing health claims, domain process assisting, providing technical support, bills collections, and outbound selling.

High-level skill jobs are being done by 35 percent of the respondents. Some of the tasks they do are decision making for troubled projects and accounts, providing technical support, complex claims processing, technology service desk works, and financial analysis, among others.

The survey however, indicated that voice service is still a key service offering of the country's entire outsourcing business, with about half employees doing voice accounts and the other half non-voice services.

The same study also emphasized that while contact center jobs are still supporting voice-related services, a rising number of tasks involve non-voice channels as well.

According to the survey, this shift to non-voice is playing a significant role in the evolution of jobs within the industry.

 "Contact center companies in the country are exhibiting high level of readiness to take on more challenging tasks that require higher level of skills for both voice and non-voice jobs," assured CCAP president Jojo Uligan.