Benchmarking Report for the Call Center

Job Growth Rates

• Currently, there are a total of 1.15 million employees stationed at call centers. By the year 2022, these figures are expected to reach at least 1.5 million.
• The reason behind this is due to more efficient recruitment combined with hiring techniques.
• The portfolio has likewise expanded into non-traditional jobs including Social Media specialists, among many others.

Global Market Growth

• Within the next couple of years, the global market is expected to grow roughly 10 to 15 percent – that’s $250 billion. The Philippine call centers are also expected to grow with it.
• Back in 2015, the Philippines accounted for a total of 12.7 percent of the $22.9 billion total revenue throughout the world.
• In the year 2022, this figure is expected to grow even more, to a total of $38.9 billion. For the Philippines, as long as all goes according to plans, they will take up to approximately 15.5 percent of that total figure.

BPO Industries in the Philippines

The BPO sector has went above and beyond – they aren’t just offering traditional voice calls. In fact, now, they offer a wide arrange of services including:

• Payroll Development
• Payroll Benefits Processing
• Human Resources
• Management
• Hiring and Staffing
• Commercial Services
• Consumer Services
• Loan Administration
• Banking and Finance
• Check Processing
• Credit/Debit Card Services
• Collection Services
• Inventory and Warehousing
• Logistics
• Industry Management
• Order Fulfillment/Procurement
• Health Information Services
• Transportation and Distribution
• Diagnostic Reading Services
• Care Services
• Medical Transcription
• Customer Analysis
• Customer Service
• Contact Centers
• Sales, Marketing, and Customer Care
• Billing
• Help Desk
• Accounting Services
• Claims Processing
• Document Management
• Airline Ticking and Travel
• Architecture Drafting Services
• Legal Support Services
• Engineering Design Services
• Other BPO Niches
• Animation
• General Liaison
• Accounts Receivable
• Shareholder Services

Market Profile

While Voice Services or Contact Centers make up for the biggest slice of “BPO” pie with a total of 69 percent, the other sectors aren’t all that far behind them.

• HR -5%
• Finance -15%
• Engineering -2%
• Others- 6%

Number of Contact Centers

According to Philippine Economic Zone Authority, or PEZA for short, there are a total of 788 BPO companies composed of large and SMEs.

Markets Services:

Asia (Asia-Pacific) and the United States are still the top markets that most BPOs cater to. However, Europe, more specifically the United Kingdom, is now thought of as the new and emerging markets.

• Breakdown of FTE by Geography looks something like:
• Europe (United Kingdom) – 9%
• North America (Canada and United States) – 77%
• Japan – 5%
• New Zealand and Australia – 9%

Languages Spoken and Required

• UK English – 14%
• American English – 75.2%
• Australian English – 8.2%
• European – 0.2%
• Asian-Japanese – 1.7%

Opening Days

In the Philippines, almost half of the contact centers are open 7 days a week. 31 percent of those call centers just so happen to be open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Looking at the statistics, there are a higher amount of contact centers with 20+ seats that are open 7 days a week. There are also a higher proportion of outsourced contact centers that are open 7 days a week, 24 hours a day.

Contact Handling

• Customer contacts per channel – Over ½ of the contacts are handled via the phone, by voice. Statistically speaking, there is a higher proportion of outsources contact centers that are handling customer contact over the phone by the contact center.
• Primary Activity at Contact Center – the primary activity of over half of the contact centers in the Philippines have been offering customer support/customer service – this is nesting at around 52 percent.
• Inbound vs Outbound Functionality – In the Philippines, most of the contact centers have blended omnichannel support and functionality.
• Mean Weekly Transaction Volume per Center – On average, on a weekly basis, each contact center handles an average of 160,339 total transactions.
• Channel Volumes – The share of transactions through each channel highlights a high reliance on agents. For the transactions that come through the contact center with no automation, agents handle a49 percent of them. In addition, 18 percent of those transactions after some functions have been handled by IVR.
• Contact Center Transactions – There is a higher proportion of outsourced contact centers that are handling transaction by phone.
• Inbound and Outbound Percent of Total Calls – For the calls that are handled by contact centers in the Philippines, 66 percent of them are inbound.
• Agent Call Handling – Number of calls per agent per shift: Philippine outbound and blended agents handle somewhere between 60-70 calls per shift in a given day. In outsourced call centers, inbound agents handle a higher amount of calls than inbound-only agents that work in in-house contact centers.
• Percentage of Contact Centers that Report an Up or Cross Selling Opportunities from Inbound Calls – In the Philippines, 71 percent of the contact centers report opportunities to up or cross-sell from inbound calls.
• Mean Percentage of Total Inbound Calls that Present an Up or Cross-Selling Opportunity – Looking at the companies in the Philippines that report an opportunity to up or cross-sell from total inbound, there are a total of 52 percent of all inbound calls present an opportunity to up or cross sell.

Budgets and Costs

Budget Allocation – When it comes to the budget in the Philippines, there’s an average of 46 percent that is allocated to labor-related expenses. 19 percent is allocated to telecommunications, and 20 percent of that budget is allocated to technology expenses.

Cost per Seat and Optimized Cost per Transaction – The annual cost per set in the Philippines is US $18,086. Hourly cost per seat averages out at US $4.83. Cost per transaction is US $0.40.

Take note that the calculations here are based on one seat operating 12 hours a day for 6 days a week – this totals 3,744 hours per annum. On average, the seat handles 12 contacts per hour – that figure comes out to 33,928 per annum, with the average call duration at 3 minutes and an average wrap time of 1 minute. As for the occupancy rate of this seat, it averages out at 80%. The transaction cost is an estimate of what an optimally performing contact center should cost given these conditions.

Human Resources

• Staff Salary – In the Philippines, full-time agents are paid on average PHP 163,848 per year, with a median of PHP 150,000. When it comes to part-time agents, they are paid pm average PHP 69 per hour, with a median of PHP 45. For a contact center manager, the average annual salary is PHP 475,878. Team leaders/supervisors receive an average of PHP 269,296 per year.
• Agent Gender and Age – In contact centers in the Philippines, the gender is a fairly even split. 58 percent of the workers are female while 42 percent of them are male. Their ages range between 18 to 34.
• Staff Ratios – In the Philippines, the ratio of Contact Center Manager/Supervisor to Agent is 1:8.
• Agent Training: In the Philippines, new recruits have an average of 20 days of training before they start to work in the contact center. Experienced Agents will receive an average of 7 days of external/internal classroom training on a yearly basis. They will also receive an average of 10 days on the job training on a yearly basis as well as 5 days of e-learning training per year. New recruits in contact centers with 100+ seats receive a larger amount of internal/external classroom training days.
• In contact centers with 100+ seats, experienced agents get a higher amount of external/internal classroom training days.
• Experienced agents that are working in outsourced contact centers have a higher amount of external/internal classroom training days.
• Sick Leave and Agent Telework – In the Philippines, each agent has an average of 11 days of sick leave per year. Approximately 6 percent of the contact centers allow their agents to telework. In those centers that give their agents the opportunity to telework, around 1 percent of the agents choose to do so.
• Staff Attrition and Tenure – The mean attrition rate of fulltime agents in the Philippines comes to 18%. For part-time agents, the mean attrition rate is 24 percent. Statistically, there is a higher amount of in-house contact centers with 0 percent part-time and full-time agent attrition.
• 51 percent of the agents that choose to quit their job at contact centers in the Philippines have done so by resigning. 23 percent of those individuals have transferred to other parts of the business. One in ten of the agents who leave did not renew their contract and ten percent of the agents who leave are retrenched or dismissed

Technology

Technology Implemented – In the Philippines, the top three most commonly implemented technologies are Customer Relationship Management (CRM) – 58%, Interactive Voice Response (IVR) – 40%, and Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) – 60%.  Other forms of technology that is commonly used include Call Recording System – 36%, Internet Protocol (IP) Telephony – 47%, Workforce Management Software – 30% and Speech Recognition Software – 27%.

Technology Purchase – The main contact center technologies that will more than likely be purchased within the next year in the Philippines would be Voice & Data Recording and QM, E-Learning and Interactive Voice Response systems.

Disaster Recovery Planning – 58 percent of the contact centers that are currently residing in the Philippines have a good disaster recovery plan in mind. However, there are 42 percent of them that do not have a disaster recovery plan in place.

Key Performance Indicators

• Average Inbound Talk Time (Seconds) – 329
• Average Abandonment Rate – 10%
• First Call Resolution – 73%
• Occupancy Rate – 75%
• Average Outbound Talk Time (Seconds) – 300
• Average Speed of Answer (Seconds) -26
• No Target – 23 Percent
• Mean percentage of calls that are picked up within service level target – 77 percent

Call Quality Measured Used – 69% of the call centers are monitored by a supervisor. Half of the contact centers use what is referred to as Call-Back Surveys and 40 percent use Random Surveys by Agents.

Percentage of Contact Centers that have Quality Accreditation – 19 percent have COPC quality accreditation, 32 percent of contact centers have ISO-9000 quality accreditation, and 57 percent of the contact centers do not have quality accreditation.

Outsourcing of Contact Centre Functionality

• 50 percent of companies are currently outsourcing contact center functionality
• 22 percent of organizations are currently outsourcing some of their contact center functionality
• Current Outsource Locations – Of those contact centers that are in the Philippines and are currently outsourcing some of their contact center functionality, 70 percent of those centers are outsourcing to the Philippines. A small percentage are outsourcing to other countries.
• Organizations that are Planning to Outsource Any Additional Contact Center Functionality in the Next Year – 17 percent of the contact centers that are located in the Philippines are planning to outsource some contact center functionality within the next year.
• Planned Outsourced Locations – Of those contact centers that are planning to outsource some contact center functionality in the next year, 75 percent of them plan to outsource in the Philippines. A small percentage plan to outsource to other countries.

Management Challenges

Significant Challenges Facing Contact Centers in the Near Year – Respondents that reside in the Philippines are under the impression that the three major challenges that will be facing contact centers over the next year include: Cost, Marketing, and Recruitment.