On the back of another great story of western organisations outsourcing to Asia, namely Jetstar transferring over 400 jobs from Australia to the Philippines, consisting mainly of contact centre and technical tasks, this week’s blog will be on that very topic; Outsourcing.

According to Jetstar Group chief executive Bruce Buchanan, "The Philippines is a strong Asian market. Traffic is high due to Filipino workers outside the country... We are always looking for opportunities to boot up network presence in the market. We are growing in excess of 200% in revenues from [flights originating in] the Philippines for the last 12 months. A sign of how popular the services are."

As we can see Jetstar have recognised the potential and strength of the Philippines market to their business, hence building an in-country presence to accommodate this.

There are ofcourse other considerations why organisations may want to off-shore their business processes. Some of these include the quality of service provided, the quality of telecommunications infrastructure and the accent / language skills of the labour force in the off-shore country. For more details on the outsourcing trends and attitudes of Australian organisations, please refer to the latest callcentres.net outsourcing market report: Australian Contact Centre Outsourcing Market Study 2011. Contact Julie for more information on this report: juliet@callcentres.net

There are many purposes of a prison or correctional facility, these include to...

1. Punish those that have committed a crime and hopefully prevent them from committing any more crimes;
2. Protect the society from criminals, especially dangerous ones; and most importantly
3. Rehabilitate inmates in order to help them cope when they get released.

We have seen many examples of how call centres in prisons have helped rehabilitate inmates... the Dillwynia Correctional Facility for Women (NSW, Australia), the Connect Centre call centre within the Changi Women's Prison (Singapore) and more recently a high-security prison outside Hyderabad.

According to Gopinath Reddy, director general of prisons in the state of Andhra Pradesh, "We have got so many computer literates and professionals in our prison... So far they are not being fully recognised, but now their knowledge will be utilised for the nation and when they go out they can also lead a meaningful life." - What a fantastic idea and vision!

In fact inmates who are trained in a job and who do secure employment on the outside are significantly less likely to reoffend and significantly more likely to become active and valuable members of society again.

We here at callcentres.net have visited several call centres within prisons across the Asia-Pacific region and what we consistently see in all the centres is an extremely high level of passion, engagement and dedication from the inmates... what more can you ask for in a call centre worker! particularly with attrition continuing to plague the call centre industry in Asia...

Welcome to the first posting of DragonCall... and Happy Lunar New Year to all my fellow Asians across the region, wishing you all a safe and prosperous new year ahead!

This week I'd like to make reference to the news article where 300 women graduates were offered ICT training in Cebu for contact centre or computer hardware courses – this investment in women is great news for the contact centre industry. According to the latest callcentres.net Asian Contact Centre Industry Benchmarking Study, 64% of contact centre workers in Asia are women, even more prevalent is this female ratio in China and Thailand where 77% of contact centre workers are women, that's three out of every four contact centre workers! Is this because females make the best contact centre workers... or is it because females enjoy talking more over the phone? Indeed our research shows that the most engaged contact centre workers are women over 35 years of age. It would be great to hear your views on who makes the most engaged or effective contact centre worker.