Automation to Affect Philippines’ Call Center Industry

Staff Report

MANILA: The Philippines’ call center industry, one of the biggest sources of revenue for the country, is threatened by automation.

In recent years, the Philippines, like India, has capitalized on its relatively large pool of English speakers to attract Western companies eager to cut costs by shifting customer service and other tasks to lower-wage countries, Business Daily reported.

However, improvement in technology means an increasing number of the Philippines’ 1.2 million call-centre workers, whose pay is modest by US standards, may soon be replaced by customer-service robots, the report said.

Robots already are starting to displace some humans from low-end tasks such as monitoring the performance of digital networks, according to Benedict Hernandez, an executive at the IT and Business Process Association of the Philippines, the industry trade group.

And, while robots are not yet smart enough to replace the human phone operators who do jobs like fielding calls from bank clients or helping people reset their modems, they will be within five years or so, according to Hernandez and other outsourcing specialists.

That means the industry needs to upgrade its skills — and fast. Automation has taken a significant toll on India’s outsourcing industry, which is heavily involved in networking and information-technology services, and industry executives fear the disruption will only increase.

Not long ago, some of those services, such as network monitoring, required dozens of human network engineers, but can now be done with a handful of people who oversee a largely automated system.

Those types of services account for just a small slice of the Philippines’ outsourcing business. But Hernandez’s group, fearing that call centres may be next, is mapping out a plan to move the industry more toward upscale services, such as health-care management, animation, game development and engineering. Some call-centres already provide these higher-end services, along with rivals in India and Vietnam, Business Daily reported.

(Source: FilipinoTimes.ae)