THE Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Davao said the business process outsourcing (BPO) will continue to be competitive in the voice services sector.
In an interview with ICT Davao president attorney Samuel Matunog, he said that they plan to further developing the services that the BPO in the Philippines is noted to be good at.
“Worldwide, we are leading with voice services. We are competing against China and India. We are competing against everyone else in the world. And we are hands down leading in that area…Our focus now is to always ensure that we will be competitive in voice. We will have to be competitive. But my suggestion is that we pay attention to where we are strong,” said Matunog.
He said it would be a better direction to focus on something the country is good at and to better the services the sector can provide. In the coming years, Matunog said the direction of the BPO industry should steer towards maintaining the lead in the voice services sector.
When asked how this will affect the talents untapped for non-voice sector of the BPO industry, Matunog said the non-voice is currently growing and keeping up however it is more difficult to locate them compared to center-based BPO industries. He said there are more non-voice that are employed home-based or are freelancers.
“[Non-voice] is one of our fastest-growing segments in our districts [such as] our freelancers who are online workers and many of them are into content development. The only thing is it’s very hard to find them,” he said.
Matunog continued saying that the current trend in the BPO employment when in comes to human resources is the deployment of people to work for specific fields that they have studied for. Hotel and Restaurant Management (HRM) and Tourism graduates are now being hired to do BPO jobs relating to content and account management of BPO works that would involve knowledge of the said field. The same trend is also being observed now for engineering graduates as well.
He said the better way to train fresh graduates with communicating and interacting in a virtual environment is to have them work in a BPO setting.