Speaking of reasons for the current buoyant state of the Filipino call center market, Teleserv's Raffy David explained the benefits of low labor costs. He said that his company now had the leeway to devote capital to new technologies – something they had been investing in for the best part of a decade in any case.
Apparently someone manning the phonelines at his organization earns around $4,800 per annum, so a substantial portion of the money saved in paying operator salaries can be ploughed directly into investing in the new technologies that are all geared towards improving the customer experience. He underlined this attitude: ‘It's all about enhancing the customer's experience. We want to give them a fast, efficient and highly personalised service.'
Another interesting point to note is the fact that Teleserv staff do a lot more than simply manning phone lines – even if these are frequently queuing with eager caller queries. Call centers are now dealing with increasingly frequent levels of enquiry that arrive via email. To deal with this phenomenon, call centers are now developing systems hat allow emails to be filtered. In this way, common subjects can be batched together, which enable any one agent to deal with multiple enquiries efficiently.
An all-pervasive aspect of 21st century mass communication is, of course, social media, and this too has had a significant effect on call center traffic. Because more and more customers are taking the opportunity to make direct content via Facebook pages or Twitter accounts, the call center organizations have had to respond to enable them to meet this increasing need.
At Teleserv, another innovation is a system that brackets all social media into one easily manageable folder. All staff can have instant access to enquiries coming into the center, no matter through which channel they actually arrive. Keeping on top of all this sometimes means that some outsourcing of responsibility is required. Teleserv employ third parties, such as Avaya, who have a proven track record in providing solutions to telecommunication issues.
Edgar Doctolero of Avaya Philippines stated that customer service had to step up to the plate when it came to dealing with the increasing demands of social media. ‘Especially now, with so many people using social media, businesses have to be very careful that their service is good. It's so easy for people to post opinions - either good or bad - on Facebook or Twitter, and their message can go viral really quickly. Imagine the impact that can have on a contact center?'