Leading contact center company Teleperformance is staying put in Bacolod City amid the global economic downturn that is hurting multinational companies that hire the services of call centers in the Philippines, one of its officials said yesterday.

“The idea that Teleperformance will leave Bacolod is not going happen. We’re here to stay,” recruitment director Paul Felton said at the e-Services 2009 Roadshow of the Department of Trade and Industry with the Center for International Trade Expositions and Missions at the Provincial Capitol Governor’s Hall.

Felton, who spearheads the hiring of Telepeformance local workforce, said the issue is not whether companies want their services because many of those that have been resistant to offshoring now realize that they can cut cost by doing services from offshore locations.

The challenge, he said, is finding qualified people.

“We have plenty of applicants. It’s just that they’re not meeting our qualification level. The main issue is their English communication skills,” Felton said.

To address this, Teleperformance, which serves a predominantly American market,  is working with the local academe in developing a call center curriculum, he said.

“We’ve been working on it for several months, but it’s a long-term process. It’s not something that’s going happen overnight and we realize that, so we’re being patient. We know that in a long-term things are going to work very well here in Bacolod,” Felton said.  

He said that Bacolod was their top choice for a location outside Metro Manila because of its huge number of able graduates, among others.  

Teleperformance, which opened its Bacolod call center in 2006,  has more than 1,200 employees in the city manning five different accounts, and plans to hire more shortly.

“We’ve got ongoing classes scheduled all the way through February so we’ll be hiring a lot more people,” Felton said.*NLG

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