Ibex brings diverse outsourcing jobs to Jamaica
GLOBAL OUTSOURCING powerhouse, ibex, has continued its Jamaican expansion by bringing more diverse jobs to the island’s global digital services industry.
The company, which is known for providing customer support via phone, chat and email in sectors that include retail, finance, healthcare and telecommunications, is also now offering a broad spectrum of business services for clients from Jamaica.
These include its online marketing accelerator ibex Digital, which offers search engine marketing, social media advertising, and lead generation solutions. Ibex also offers financial services solutions, such as credit and transaction support, and banking, from their service centres on the island.
With a client list heavily concentrated in the US, Europe, and Asia, ibex identified Jamaica as the perfect place for rapid expansion due to the island’s location and high-quality talent.
Speaking on the enterprise’s progress, Country Director Jaime Vergara said,“Ibex has experienced incredible growth in Jamaica – in the last three years we’ve grown 397 per cent. We have gone from ranking as the 17th outsourcing company on the island for number of employees to number one, and ibex has been recognised for not only our growth, but for our performance, by organisations like Frost & Sullivan, a leading industry analyst group, and as Nexus Nearshore BPO of the Year in 2019 by Nearshore Americas.”
EMPLOYER OF CHOICE
Ibex’s strong culture and deep employee engagement initiatives have made it an attractive place to work in the region, and have served to accelerate its expansion. The company currently hires over two thousand Jamaicans every year, and is actively looking to drive its knowledge sector recruitment across the island. Vergara explained, “We feel like we have become an employer of choice for Jamaicans. We are a company who knows employee satisfaction and engagement is beneficial not only for ibex, but for our employees.”
This high-calibre staff ibex has attracted cleared the way for the company to bring more business to Jamaica’s outsourcing industry. Ibex is now offering knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) services from the island’s service centres.
KPO is the outsourcing of information-related business activities which are integral to its overall operations. This type of outsourcing requires advanced technical skills, as well as specialist expertise.
KPO includes areas such as accounting outsourcing (accounting, auditing, bookkeeping, payroll), human resources (HR) outsourcing (HR consultancy, employee hiring), digital marketing, and even management consultancy. Legal, medical and other healthcare analysis are other examples of KPO used by people every day.
With the specialised skills needed for KPO, Vergara said Jamaica was the perfect location for ibex to offer these services. “Jamaica offers a talented and educated labour pool, which is what has made us attractive to our clients, particularly in the financial services sector. Through programmes like the GSSP (Global Services Skills Project), the employees we hire are on a career path and are looking for companies to join where they can be successful. They are eager to work with their customers in their specialised area.”
Since the company has started offering KPO, Vergara says ibex has seen a positive impact on its clients. He explains that ibex’s responsiveness to the market based on a technology-led and highly agile operational model, is what is needed to perform well in the growing transformation of the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, and to operate in what ibex refers to as the BPO 2.0 world.
Vergara says, “In delivering customised solutions like value-added business analytics, customer insights to improve performance, and integrated social media reputation management and intelligence to our clients by leveraging our BPO 2.0 approach, we have built a reputation of trust, performance, and reliability with our clients. In fact, we have a 100 per cent retention rate of our top 25 clients over the last four years.”
Ibex believes that its advancement into KPO has led to increased customer confidence, displaying the company’s adaptation to the needs of today’s clients.
According to Vergara, as the industry grows globally, ibex has plans to further its expansion. Jamaica has been supportive of ibex and the local outsourcing industry as a whole, with sector bodies like the Global Services Association of Jamaica, a national outsourcing coordinator to improve the country’s outsourcing ecosystem, and the island’s national outsourcing strategy creating a good environment for the sector to thrive. There are currently over 40,000 Jamaicans working in the industry.
“We have found the Jamaican Government to be very supportive of our industry,” says Vergara, “and this extends even to the local government. They have partnered with us and have been a stakeholder in our success. Additionally, we have experienced incredible support from government-backed organisations including JAMPRO, the Office of the Prime Minister, and JSEZA. Our partnerships also extend to the private sector and local businesses.”
As the world further relies on BPO and KPO during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is predicted that more business services will be digitised during and after the crisis. This and other factors will increase the demand for outsourcing, creating the environment for ibex to safely execute its growth plans, both in Jamaica and around the world.
Ibex launched its first service centre in Jamaica in Portmore in 2016.The company now has five service centres in St Catherine, Kingston and St Andrew, and St Ann.