The Freeman

Call center firms keep up through constant trainings

- Ehda M. Dagooc,

The robust call center industry in the Philippine­s is catching up with the paradigm shift in terms of service as Artificial Intelligen­ce is slowly taking over voice-related jobs.

This prompted call center companies to invest more aggressive­ly on constant trainings and upscaling investment­s to their manpower pool to cope with higher-value job assignment­s.

A survey conducted by the Contact Center Associatio­n of the Philippine­s (CCAP) entitled "Job Complexity Survey," confirmed that there is an ongoing shift in contact centers’ business models and evolution of agents’ jobs, as reflected in the nature of current job tasks.

Of those agents who are doing voice jobs, only 14 percent are engaged in lowskill tasks. Such traditiona­l voice-job responsibi­lities include telemarket­ing, order taking, and provision of simple customer service assistance.

Those engaged in jobs requiring middle-level skills comprises of 51percent of the respondent­s. Their job tasks range from providing solutions to customers’ problems, processing health claims, domain process assisting, providing technical support, bills collection­s, and outbound selling.

High-level skill jobs are being done by 35 percent of the respondent­s. Some of the tasks they do are decision making for troubled projects and accounts, providing technical support, complex claims processing, technology service desk works, and financial analysis, among others.

The survey however, indicated that voice service is still a key service offering of the country's entire outsourcin­g business, with about half employees doing voice accounts and the other half non-voice services.

The same study also emphasized that while contact center jobs are still supporting voice-related services, a rising number of tasks involve nonvoice channels as well.

According to the survey, this shift to non-voice is playing a significan­t role in the evolution of jobs within the industry.

"Contact center companies in the country are exhibiting high level of readiness to take on more challengin­g tasks that require higher level of skills for both voice and nonvoice jobs," assured CCAP president Jojo Uligan.

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