Dead-end Job No More

Call center agents have gone beyond making and answering phone calls. Menial jobs like directory assistance by a typical agent 15 years ago have vanished to give way to automation. The Philippines now has very little exposure to basic data entry jobs.

Industry officials said today, a call center job is no longer a dead-end job or an “in-between” job. It is now a career.

Benedict Hernandez, president of the Contact Center Association of the Philippines (CCAP), said just as the industry has evolved in the past 15 years, its agents have skilled up, taking on more sophisticated call center jobs, raising the bar for the sector that employs 800,000 people and generates close to $14 billion revenues annually.

Hernandez said while voice is the main platform of the contact center industry, customer care support which is a basic offering of call centers have tapped email, chat, social media, multi-channel and omni-channel to deliver the service.

From providing pure customer care, Philippine contact centers have moved to customer value retention, loyalty, upselling, cross selling as well as finance and accounting, data analytics and technical support.

From help desk, local contact centers now handle administrative and human resource engagement.

According to Hernandez, more than 50 percent of contact center jobs have scaled up to the mid- to high-level work as the industry shifts to digital and technology-enabled business environment that requires agents to handle more complex jobs.

The biggest growth is in the data security as well as cloud expertise.

In Accenture, which Hernandez heads, the company hires nurses, pharmacists and even doctors for its “medical reachout” service, where discharged patients are monitored for their medication and other follow-through medical needs.

The company also now provides network design solutions via voice and data to connect clients to telcos as well as information technology infrastructure maintenance where even servers and systems are outsourced.

Faced with higher-value jobs, contact center agents now have better paying jobs; and for the first time in recent years, the attrition rate has gone down to below 50 percent from a high average of 60 to 70 percent.

According to JojoUligan, CCAP board trustee, call center agents have upgraded themselves in tandem with the industry, especially those who began their careers in the sector fresh from college.

Hernandez also disabused the notion that call center agents are more vulnerable to health problems because of their unusual working schedules and lifestyles.

“That is more the exception rather than the rule,” said Hernandez on the bad rap earned by call center agents for engaging in unhealthy habits like drinking and smoking to cope with the stress of the job.

He said a survey of CCAP members shows take-up of healthcare insurance of the industry is relatively the same as that of other industries like manufacturing.

But he noted CCAP is watching those numbers because of the industry’s young demographics, the average age being 24.

Contrary to popular notion that call center companies only hire from classes A and B, Hernandez said the industry plucks out candidates from low-tuition schools who “need to earn and become bread winners.”

“The contact center industry contributes to (expanding) the middle class,” he said.

Source: http://goo.gl/UkRJfn