CEBU, Philippines — Landing a job in the call center industry now requires more than just fluency in the English language.
Contact Center Association to the Philippines (CCAP) reminded once again the new graduates, and those who are planning to enter the call center industry to equip themselves with higher value skills such as know-how on analytics, and other complicated skills.
“Logically, a shift in the priority for professionals’ level of skills required to perform tasks will have an impact to the Philippine IT-BPM industry, particularly to the contact center sub-sector,” said Contact Center Association of the Philippines (CCAP) President Jojo Uligan.
According to Uligan, a new wave of industrial revolution is shaking up the landscape of the IT-business management (IT-BPM) process industry not just globally but more so locally.
This ushers in challenges that must be overcome collectively, he added.
CCAP as an organization, has been implementing programs to enhance the capabilities of existing employees, to handle complicated jobs, other than plain customer service processes.
Uligan assured that the Philippine contact center sector is taking the necessary steps to overcome the challenges brought about by this shift.
“The industry is investing heavily in training for both entry-level and tenured positions,” he said.
At present, the local IT-BPM industry earmarks an annual revenue of US$27.1 billion P141 trillion about 18 percent of the total global IT-BPM industry which stands for about $83bn (P4.32 trillion), based on latest data from the global think tank The Everest Group.
The contact center segment of the industry keeps a big slice of the pie—accounting for an annual revenue of U$14.6 billion (P759.2 billion) and employing more than 890,000 call center professionals nationwide.
“As CCAP together with the rest of the contact center sector has been emphasizing for quite some time now, we have taken a proactive approach to this change,” Uligan said.
“It is a common knowledge in our industry that we have already been implementing changes in job tasks and description to cope with the evolving requirements.”
In a previous analysis by industry consultancy firm Frost & Sullivan, tasks that require basic skills (low-level) in the global BPO landscape is projected to decline by 29 percent by 2022.
At the same time, mid-skill jobs are expected to rise by 12 percent while positions that require higher skills are projected to jump by 19 percent.
New Customer Expectations
From the traditional focus, which is customer services delivery, the Philippine contact center sector is now geared towards an emerging priority—customer experience delivery. During the recent Contact Islands summit organized by CCAP in the second half of 2018, the evolving customer expectations were identified.
Local contact center firms now prioritize quick and accurate resolution, personalized interactions, demand for self-service option, interaction in customers’ preferred channel, and seamless/consistent experience. Disruptive technologies also point to automation, analytics, and artificial intelligence to meet delivery of customer experience (CX), he added.
“Mid- and high-skilled jobs are getting more demand in our industry. Our professionals are now finding their selves more engaged in complicated tasks that require experience or specialized expertise paired with abstract reasoning and situational response/autonomy,” Uligan explained.
Based on results of an internal research by CCAP, mid- and high-skilled jobs in the contact center sector account for 85 percent of positions. That is ahead compared to a projection by Frost & Sullivan that about 73 percent of the global IT-BPM industry will be covering mid- and high-skilled jobs by 2022.