The country’s contact center and business process management (BPM) industry is still changing as new technologies emerge, especially Generative AI, which is quickly used in many IT-BPM tasks.
The Contact Center Association of the Philippines (CCAP) is confident that the sector could easily keep its position as the world’s top provider of voice and business process outsourcing (BPO) services and the “heart of customer experience” by using Generative AI, which critics say could be a boon or a bane for the BPO industry.
“Generative AI can be used to automate and enhance various aspects of customer interactions. Some examples are chatbots and virtual assistants. There are automated email responses for faster adaptability. To illustrate, in the past, when an agent needed to respond to a customer’s call, he had to look at the CRM and backtrack or even go to the knowledge base. Now, these things are automated, further enhancing agent productivity,” said CCAP President Mickey Ocampo.
Rosario Cajucom-Bradbury, the Managing Director of CCAP, said that Generative AI affects client businesses, and the BPO Industry delivers the way services and the corporate benefits of providers, such as HR, Finance, etc.
She said that having Generative AI Assist work with agents while they handle calls makes them more efficient, productive, and able to help customers. “This gives the call agent a chance to listen more actively and show real empathy instead of being distracted by figuring out how to get through the system. Filipinos are naturally service-oriented, and when combined with the power of Generative AI, this makes the employees’ experience at work even better. This leads to a more satisfying customer experience, which helps the Philippines stay the “heart of CX” and meet or even exceed growth goals, said Cajucom-Bradbury.
Pushkar Misra, President and CEO of HGS (Hinduja Global Solutions) and a CCAP Board Director, said that Generative AI is doing more high-complexity jobs. “It doesn’t make some jobs obsolete; instead, it makes it even more important to upskill and reskill talent, which is already happening in the industry as a whole,” he said.
2028 IT-BPM Roadmap
The country’s contact center industry has set an annual revenue goal of $59 billion by 2028, with CCAP-member companies expected to bring in about $49 billion. In 2022, the sector made an actual income of $27 billion, which is 84% of the total income of the IT-BPM industry, which was $32 billion.
The ambitious goal is part of the 2028 IT-BPM Roadmap, released in the third quarter of 2022, when President Ferdinand “Bong Bong” Marcos Jr. took office. It also sets a goal of 2.5 million full-time workers, of which 2.3 million will work for CCAP-member firms, and a 40% expansion of the countryside. In 2022, 1.4 million people worked in the contact center sector—87% of the 1.6 million people who worked in the local IT-BPM industry.
Ocampo said that the effects of Generative AI could be seen in the sector’s numbers in two to four years. He also clarified that the new technology wasn’t considered when the IT-BPM Roadmap was made, “because it just came out about seven months ago, even though AI has been used in the industry for a long time.”
At the Contact Islands Conference 2023, these and other exciting issues and events will be front and center. With the theme “The Philippines, the Heart of CX,” the conference is set to give delegates another world-class experience and give leaders and decision-makers in the sector a great place to share ideas, get coaching, network, and compare notes.
is Rafael Pedrajita offline. He is the founder of Tech Patrol. He's been a freelancer and a blogger since March of 2010. He married a beautiful woman named Amor. You can follow him on his Social Media accounts in the links below.
