BPO industry expanding rapidly toward non-voice services — BPAP

(Updated 7:19 p.m.) The business process outsourcing (BPO) industry is expanding toward the non-voice side of the equation, the Business Processing Association of the Philippines (BPAP) said Friday.

 

The non-voice sector generated $3.6 billion in 2011– or over a third of the $11 billion revenues the BPO industry generated last year – up from $2.8 billion the previous year, the association said in a statement.

 

Research and consultancy firm Everest Group expects the global market for outsourced services would range from $220 billion to $280 billion this year, 90 percent of which would be non-voice work, BPAP noted.

 

 “The demand for new outsourced services is increasing and the potential for non-voice and other emerging services is enormous,” said BPAP senior executive director Gillian Virata. As demand for workers in the voice sector would double in the next five years, “non-voice would go faster than that,” Virata noted.

 

While the industry grew 24 percent in 2011, the non-voice segment alone expanded 30 percent due to “strengthening service delivery in the financial services, insurance, human resources, logistics, engineering, software, media, health care, IT, and legal industries,” BPAP said.  “The Philippine resources for non-voice have not been tapped as much as the voice sector… Not many of them are aware that they can practice what they have learned in school in BPO operations,” Virata told GMA News Online in a phone interview. Workers in the non-voice sector numbered 220,000 in 2011, those in the voice sector workers totaled 416,000, Virata added.

 

 

“IT-BPO has now evolved into an ‘industry of industries’ with a broad range of new sectors seeking to leverage opportunities in the delivery of non-voice services,” said Virata in a separate statement.

 

These include medical transcription or health care information management, animation services, and business services for banking, transportation, manufacturing, retail, and pharmaceutical industries.  — VS, GMA News