India Joins Success of Philippine’s Outsourcing Services

It seems that during these past years, India has been silently living by a popular quote when it comes to their industry of call center outsourcing.

“If you can’t beat them, join them.”

That is said to be the action taken by Indian BPO companies, so that it would not lose the businesses that they hold in their call centers.


The Indian BPO industry said that Philippines will never overtake their call center businesses. Recently, however, the favor received by the Philippines from foreign clients has made India realize that they are already behind the game.

The main reasons that foreign investors have shifted from India to the Philippines are many, and all of them are strong enough to convince clients that the kind of BPO Philippines offers is the most suitable for them.

Here are the main reasons:

1. The English accent of Filipinos is more acceptable to UK and US clients.
2. The Philippine call center industry receives a lot of support from the government.
3. The workforce is much larger than India’s—416,000 for the voice and non-voice sector; India
only has an estimated 90,000.
4. Working for the call center industry is a top career choice for Filipino professionals. The president even encouraged the youth to make it a career choice upon graduation.
5. The level of commitment to prepare a workforce for the industry is outstanding.
6. Travelling time to the country is much easier and more efficient, thanks to the number of infrastructures to accommodate air travel.


Philippines closed an annual revenue of $11 billion in 2011 from its outsourcing services. This is a remarkable growth from 2010’s $2.8 billion. The non-voice sector generated $3.6 billion in 2011. India still leads in terms of industry revenue at $16 billion in 2011, but Philippines is surely catching up.

Because of these advantages and developments, some Indian companies have transferred their BPO processes to the Philippines. These Indian companies have been in the country for 4 to 5 years, most of them arriving as early as 2007, and have employed 1,000 to 12,000 Filipino locals.

Many veterans of the BPO industry advise India to learn from the Philippines and have a commitment to nurture young people to cater careers specifically for the industry.

But India does not worry about staying behind the Philippines in terms of voice-based services because they still are the top producer of non-voice–based services. Also, aside from joining the Philippine BPO industry, India has opted in changing BPO to BPM (Business Process Management) and SMAC (Social Mobility, Analytics and Cloud). They have minimized their efforts with voice-based services, and are now focusing on non-voice services. They are then able to save on cost and generate more revenue, because a single employee can do more non-voice services.

BPM is the single critical factor that helped India maintain its position as the number one provider of non-voice services.