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And the Regular Nearshore Advantages
As an example of nearshore advantages, the $1.7 billion worth Mexican ITO market with 510,000 IT professionals, provides all distance and time-zone related advantages such as project control, short fly-time for face-to-face meetings, familiar culture, similar values, similar education programs and verifiable dedicated resources. And, being a North American Free Trade Agreement country, Mexico also enjoys a host of advantages such as the business-friendly legal framework and intellectual-property protection regulations.
Another regular advantage for customers is that U.S. citizens don’t need visas to enter most Latin American countries. Brazil and Bolivia are two prominent countries that require a visa.
Calling into Latin America
While customers have only recently begun to seriously turn to Latin America for IT services, the contact-center industry here is fairly mature. Though Spanish, Portuguese and English are the primary languages supported from the region, there are contact centers here that support other languages as well. Mexico, for instance, has customer-service centers supporting German and French, while Argentina has centers supporting Italian, and Costa Rica and Chile have call centers supporting Japanese.
“Today there are four to five major players in Monterrey and most of the operations are bilingual [Spanish and English],” says Daniel Lang, SVP, Customer Compliance Officer, Sutherland Global Services that has an 18-month old BPO center in Monterrey, Mexico. “BPOs in Mexico are now directly competing with Indian and Brazilian BPOs.” With Alcatel, Atencion Telephonica, Convergys, Hispanic Teleservices, Impulse, ING Mexico, Sitel, TeleTech, Teleperformance, Telvista, a lot of regional and international call centers are present throughout Latin America. n Chile, while the number of employees in the offshore IT-services space is quite small, the country has an excellent educational infrastructure with 63 universities, 47 professional institutes and 111 technical centers. Interestingly, in the IT-services arena, the country has better quality of employees than other destinations such as the Czech Republic, Malaysia and Hungary, says a McKinsey research report. But collaboration between the government, companies and universities is needed to arrive at more practical and flexible curricula.
Datamonitor predicts that by 2008 the number of contact centers in Latin America will touch 12,000 and the number of agents will reach 633,600.
| CAFTA countries |
| Costa Rica |
| El Salvador |
| Guatemala |
| Honduras |
| Nicaragua |
| The Dominican Republic |
| NAFTA country |
| Mexico |
| COSTA RICA |
| Lang.s supported (call centers): English, Japanese, Spanish |
| *Emerging outsourcing cities: San José |
| IT providers: Chiquita Brands, Dole, Fujitsu Consulting, HP, IBM, Maersk, Procter & Gamble |
| Latin America Calling |
Country
|
Major call centers |
*Wages of Spanish speaking agents |
*Wages of English speaking agents |
*Wages of Portuguese speaking agents |
| Argentina |
Convergys, EDS, Firstsource, MCI, Nextel, Sitel, Sykes, Teleperformance, TeleTech, Unisys |
1 to 1.50 |
2 to 2.50 |
— |
| Brazil |
Convergys, Alcatel, EDS, TeleTech, Teleperformance, Sitel |
— |
— |
— |
| Chile |
Atento, Entel, Actionline, Prego, Unisono, Sitel, Air France, Delta Air Lines, Shell, Unisys |
1.25 to 1.75 |
— |
1.10 to 1.60 |
| Colombia |
Atento, Convergys, Sitel, Contact Center Americas, Unisys |
1.35 to 1.60 |
— |
— |
| Mexico |
Infosys, ING Mexico, Sitel, Telvista, Atencion Telephonica, Hispanic Teleservices Corporation, Impulse Telecom, Atento, Teleperformance, Tele Tech, Genpact, ACS, Convergys, West Corp., EDS |
2 to 2.50 |
3.50 to 4 |
— |
| *All wages are in $/hr; Source: Datamonitor |
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