LONDON, 20 October — BT will today launch a drive to persuade its UK customers to relocate their call centers in the Asia-Pacific region. The campaign, which will target FTSE 100 companies, could lead to thousands of UK job losses in a market that employs around 2 percent of the country’s working population. BT has teamed with call-center outsourcing company Scicom to make the push. BT will offer to re-route calls to Asia, while Scicom will own and operate the call centers. The pair will claim that relocating a call center to Asia can save 20 to 40 percent on operating expenditure, mainly due to lower labor costs.
Kent Yearsley, chief executive of Scicom, said that language wasn’t a barrier to companies relocating their operations. "Things like accent just aren’t an issue any more. If a rep is polite, well trained and has a good product knowledge, then it doesn’t matter if they have a Filipino or Liverpudlian accent."
Yearsley said that companies relocating may even see an improvement in productivity and customer service. "There is no reason why we can’t get good customer service from UK centers. But we are not getting that. This is simply down to poor management and staff development," he said.
Peter Elsey, a business development director at BT, said that popular locations for call centers were Malaysia, India and the Philippines.
"In Malaysia they speak good English, there’s a high graduate population and the country has a stable government," he said.
India and the Philippines, while not as stable politically, he said, offered greater cost savings.
The news will enrage the unions. Earlier this month officials said they would ballot for strike action at Prudential after the financial services giant announced it was making 850 people redundant at its Reading call center. Prudential is moving its operation to India.
Similarly, HSBC announced it was to step up its call-center operations in India. The company’s chief executive said that "people on the subcontinent... have excellent education and numeracy skills and they are quicker at answering the phone. These are qualities we are up against in this country." (The Independent)
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