LATEST IN OUTSOURCING: Swedish Call Center Operators in the Philippines

Just now, I read about a Swedish contact center who located its offshore facility in Cagayan de Oro, a province located in the south of the Philippines. Since the company handles accounts in Sweden and there are hardly Swedish speaking Filipinos in that part of the world, the company brought in Swedish call center agents to operate the call center.

The move may come as a surprise to most people. The main reason why people outsource is the need to lower costs. Bringing the contact center agents offshore should be more expensive than simply maintaining them onshore.

The reason given by the company is that like most call center companies everywhere, they are experiencing a huge rate of employee turnovers. Since call center agents are very much in demand, their employees move from one company to another, to take advantage of better pay among other reasons. In addition, they are also having trouble recruiting and training newly hired agents.

One idea that came into their mind is the relocation of their call center facilities offshore in order to lure more employees into staying in the company for a long time. They established an office in Spain but it was not found to be successful due to the close proximity of Spain to Sweden and the high cost of living in la Espana. The company then decided to start an office in the Philippines and advertised the location using the country's warm weather, beaches, low cost of living and friendly people. Interviews with the Swedish employees seem to indicate that they are liking the Philippine office for the same reason.

Good Idea!


By the way, I found a Philippine advertisement looking for Finnish and Swedish speaking call center agents. It seems that the Cagayan experiment is successful. The ads are for a different operation. It will be in Manila, the capital of region of the Philippines.