With a continued boom in business process outsourcing (BPO), Convergys said Monday it was constructing two new sites in the Philippines and open them within the year. The company said it remained committed to an expansion plan, announced last year, which would provide as many as 7,000 new jobs.

The company will formally open this Wednesday three new sites: Cebu Asiatown i3 in Cebu City in the central Philippines, University of the Philippines-Ayala Land TechnoHub in Quezon City, and Nuvali TechnoHub in Sta. Rosa City, outside Manila. These will bring to 12 the number of Convergys’ operational contact center facilities in the Philippines. The company now has around 16,000 employees.

The UP-Ayala Land center, the company’s seventh in Metro Manila, can hold up to 1,000 employees. Another 1,000 employees can be housed at the Convergys facility in Cebu i3, the company’s third in Cebu City. The Nuvali site is Convergys’ first in Sta. Rosa, and can hold 900 employees.

With the opening of these three centers, Convergys can fulfill almost half of its job commitments for the year. Source

Though the outsourcing business has taken a considerable dip in recent times, it seems that city professionals working in the business might have the last laugh after all. Going by the reports of abusive and unsolicited feedback from callers in the UK and the US that these professionals often face in their working life, our city boys and girls might consider themselves lucky to be in outsourcing.

“Every now and then we come across an angry American posing as a client who yells at us for ‘stealing their jobs’, slamming down the phone before we can speak back to them,” says Avinash, a banking executive dealing with US based clients at a multinational firm in the City. While the trend is markedly noted in the call centres, irate first world citizens seemingly vent their ire through email and chat as well. Says Srinivas, a strategist at a Hyderabadbased IT firm on the trend: “It’s a way of venting their frustration over the telephone line or chat window for employees in the US, who presumably have been given the pink slip.” One of the causes behind such sporadic outbursts, reasons Srinivas, “is the differing nature of the Indian psyche, vis a vis the western mind. (more…)