As restrictions continue in the UK, the end of the Covid-19 crisis and the return to normal are still many months away. Social distancing will continue to affect the way that businesses can operate and will hamper demand for goods and services in many industries. Experts are expecting that the vaccination of the UK’s population will take at least another year. This means that the point at which the population is actually immunised from Covid-19 is most likely to be well into 2022.
This is not the news that businesses in the UK want to hear, but ignoring the predictions is perilous. This is not the time for burying your head in the sand and waiting for the crisis to pass. For business leaders, it is important to stay informed and make prudent assessments of the long-term economic conditions to ensure their company’s long-term survival.
One of the principal points of distress for businesses at the moment is cash flow. Plummeting demand has meant revenues have dried up, while at the same time companies need to keep making payments for their ongoing overheads such as rent and utilities.
One method for reducing these outflows is to see what services you could be migrated to call centres in the Philippines. There are many services that call centres in Manila offer; some of the most popular ones are customer care, acquisition, and back-office support.
Customer support is the most notable outsourcing service. Encompassing customer care, inbound sales, and technical support, these functions are all provided via phone, email and web chat. Customer acquisition relates to lead generation, telemarketing, and appointment setting. Finally, back-office support services, which are the least traditional services offered by contact centres in the Philippines, include content moderation, claims processing, and enterprise data management.
There are many examples of large UK corporations outsourcing their call centre services to the Philippines. Vodafone, HSBC and Prudential have all been outsourcing to the Philippines for many years. But it is not just large companies that are migrating their call centre services to the Philippines. As the processes and infrastructure have improved and reduced in cost, it has enabled small- and medium-sized enterprises to also make the most of outsourcing to the Philippines.
“Today it’s no longer just the large corporations that are tapping into the vast resource pool of the Philippines. 70% of our clients are SMEs. Especially the smaller companies that have an outsourcing need of only 5-50 agents are under extreme cost pressure. They need to find ways to lower their cost, yet, still maintain a high level of service. And that’s exactly what they are getting with us,” says Ralf Ellspermann, CEO of PITON-Global, an award-winning call centre in the Philippines.
The advantages of using call centre services in the Philippines are numerous. In addition to the English language proficiency of the workforce, the low labour cost of the employees (60% lower than the UK) and the excellent infrastructure in Manila, companies can now tap into a wealth of a call centre-experienced agents that the country has developed over the last two decades.
“It’s not just costs savings what clients get from us. They also benefit from improved operating efficiencies and an enhanced customer experience which is of critical importance in today’s hyper-competitive world,” says Ellspermann.
Even if the UK were not in the midst of a financial crisis caused by a pandemic, outsourcing call centre services to the Philippines would be a shrewd move for business leaders to make.
