The number of help desk service providers in the Philippines has rapidly grown over the last 5 years. The reason for the exponential growth of the help desk support industry in the Philippines is obvious. Expertise, Quality and Cost. The Philippines possesses a fairly large pool of highly qualified and skilled IT and Computer Science graduates that often have years of practical work experience even prior graduation. Help desk support agents in the Philippines have often worked for highly reputable companies such as IBM, Dell, Trend Micro, just to name a few, prior to landing jobs at call centers.
Help desk support agents with prior work experience usually tend to have a significantly shorter learning curve and are typically capable of meeting the services levels of Fortune 2000 corporations within a very short time frame. Above all, the Philippines is low labor cost destination that allows companies to hire skilled help desk support agents for a fraction of what companies would normally have to pay in the US or the UK.
The average help desk support agent in the Philippines is a IT or Computer Science graduate and usually possesses 1-2 years of work experience. Between 30-40% of all help desk support applicants have call center work experience. Some of the Philippine’s largest help desk providers are Dell, Microsoft and IBM. The three aforementioned captive operators (alone!) employ a combined workforce exceed 20,000 help desk support aqents in the Philippines. While during the early days almost all help desk services were provided by the world’s largest third party outsourcing providers such as TeleTech and Convergys.
Over the last few years a fairly large number of mid-sized help desk support players have successfully establish themselves in the market. The are quite a few advantages for foreign based companies choosing to work with mid-sized help desk companies in the Philippines. For one, smaller companies often provide a significantly better account management then their larger counterparts especially for small to medium sized enterprises with fairly small outsourcing requirements for help desk support services (Less than 100 agents). Smaller vendors are often also able to provide better, more customized help desk services than large help desk support outsourcing firms in the Philippines do. Last but not least, medium-sized help desk support companies are often able to offer their service at rates that are 10-30% lower than the rates offered by Tier 1 services providers.
It is estimated that the number of help desk firms will continue to increase at double digit rates over the next years to come. Help desk outsourcing to the Philippines will continue to be a valid option for an ever-increasing number of companies in the US, the UK and Australia. Most especially for small-to-medium sized enterprises.