It’s no real secret that Call Centers have been taking off in the Philippines at an amazing rate. It is also well known that many companies have shifted their growth from, or are in the process of shutting down Call Centers in India in favor of Call Centers based in Manila and Cebu in the Philippines.

One key reason that Philippines based call centers do so well is that the call center agents have such a neutral accent. Many of us have been on the phone with a call center agent in the Philippines and did not even know. Frankly, that’s just how good many are.

Recently, I had a technical support problem with a piece of computer networking equipment and called the technical support line for assistance. When I reached the agent, I was sure I was speaking to someone in the United States. If I had not lived in the Philippines myself, I probably would have missed a phrase that was spoken by the agent that is fairly unique to the Philippines. The expression was “for a while”, which in American colloquialism means “just a sec”.

Through a fairly detailed technical discussion, it was not obvious to me that I was speaking with someone outside of the country. To get through a conversation like that without me picking up on it is actually quite an achievement. As you and I know, but many call center companies seem to miss, conversation is more than just understanding and verbalizing the language. There are nuances and conversational styles and cultural clues embedded in a conversation.

The educational system in Philippines more closely mirrors that of the U.S., as it was a U.S. territory for more than forty years.

My experience with quite a few India based call centers has not quite been the same. It is pretty much understood when I speak to someone in an India based call center that the person I speak with is reading a script. When I go off script, it is easy to tell that they are getting confused and hunting through other scripts trying to figure out what to say in response. When the centers first started in India, I could generally understand their accents. Now I have the advantage of having also lived in India for over four years so my understanding of various Indian accents is probably better than the average person on the end of a phone in the United States.

With that said, I must confess that even I have had difficulty understanding some call center agents in India. Additionally, I find that I have to repeat myself in order for them to understand me. Typically, my approach is to spend as little time as possible in this position and ask to speak to a supervisor pretty quickly. Generally, the supervisor has a somewhat better command of the language, which is what got them promoted in the first place.

When one considers other types of work being done offshore of late, it occurs to me that the experience with call centers should easily translate into other services having the potential to be delivered with a higher level of quality.

For example, software development has been going on in India since the early nineties. It really took off for the Y2K work and has been successfully leveraged since then.

The most often cited reason for software project failures, even inside of the same building of the same company, is communication. Various experts with numerous studies place communication problems in the top three reasons for project failure anywhere from 60% to 90% of the time.

If you or I can speak to a call center agent in the Philippines and not even know it, would it follow that a software team in the U.S. might have an easier time speaking with a software team in the Philippines?

This hypothesis of mine is something that had occurred to me a few years ago. Since then, I took a job living in Manila running a software development/application outsourcing company serving the U.S. market. My thought was that the easiest way to prove or disprove my theory was to walk the talk and try it for myself.

What I can report is that the U.S. customer base we served almost never cited communications or misunderstanding of requirements as an issue. I am certainly not saying we never had issues, but communication and not being able to understand each other in phone discussion or email were not problems that came up.

Based on the examples that I have personally experienced, I would also venture to guess that BPO projects would also fair well in the Philippines.

While India is still the number one outsourcing destination, and is working very hard to keep that ranking, other countries have benefits to offer. The Philippines is just one of them.

I would encourage anyone considering diversifying their offshore strategy or looking to begin offshoring of call center, software application development/maintenance, or BPO to take a closer look at the Philippines.