The Caribbean islands might not find mention in the industry's lists of top global outsourcing locations, yet the warm and friendly wind of these islands is inviting to American corporate customers. Many U.S. companies are outsourcing services like customer care, helpdesk, medical claims processing, back-office processing, billing, collections, and inbound teleservices to service providers in the Caribbean.
The sunny Caribbean islands are being billed to take a part of the worldwide market for customer-service outsourcing, which is set to grow from $8.4 billion in 2004 to $12.2 billion in 2007. The signs are already showing — the contact-center agent population in the Caribbean has more than doubled to 25,000 in the past two years.
“When we decided to outsource to St. Lucia nearly three years ago, our primary objective was to lower costs. KM2 Solutions has not only helped us achieve that objective, but in the course of working with them, AOL has also realized a much higher level of client retention. In fact, AOL's ‘partnership' with KM2 Solutions has played an integral role in our company's expansion of call centers to other Caribbean islands.”
— Bob Goodwin, Program Director, AOL
American corporates looking to nearshore customer-care services are discovering that the region offers low labor costs, available skills, cultural proximity, quality services and a low security risk. The ability to service customers across multiple languages is a particular strong point of these ex European colonies. English, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and French are some languages spoken fluently in these islands.
Moreover, as compared to mature nearshoring destinations in Latin America , the biggest advantage of these countries is their low attrition level — it hovers at less than five percent.
Though tourism contributes a significant amount to the Caribbean 's economy, the island governments are also encouraging the services sectors by improving education and taking steps to develop state-of-the-art telecommunication infrastructure and aviation. The result is the presence of several multinational companies — Telenetwork, Apple Vacations, AT&T, Cingular Wireless, Verizon, FedEx, FoneMed, SITEL, Fujitsu, West Corporation, Technion, ACS Business Solutions, Teleservices Direct, Overdrive and Neal & Massyare.
