Now a looming wave of automation is threatening employment at call centres and forcing the industry to retrain workers to meet the demand for higher skilled jobs in areas such as healthcare, banking, finance and insurance.
“The biggest challenge is people,” Jojo Uligan, president of the Contact Center Association of the Philippines or CCAP, said in an interview at his office in Manila on Wednesday. “We lack people with enough technical expertise and experience to service emerging needs.”
The Philippines is the world’s top call centre destination with companies like Accenture Plc and American Express among those that have set up shop in the Southeast Asian nation. They’ve been lured by cheaper wages, Filipinos’s cultural affinity with the West, and a 100 million population that’s mostly fluent in English.
With technology constantly advancing, machines are now able to replicate some of the tasks that people do, including customer relations. More than half of outsourced jobs could be lost in a few years unless significant retraining is done, according to a study by Tholons Capital, a New York-based consultancy.
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