This article gives a comprehensive perspective on the outsourcing market in Romania.
http://www.thediplomat.ro/articol.php?id=911

As the market matures and the global economy stabilizes , I expect a surge in the acquisition activity.

Black Book of Outsourcing (a Datamonitor company) named XL World one of the top multilingual call and contact center outsourcers globally. We have been declared the top call center for Eastern European languages and the second in the global ranking.
Read more on: XL World top call center

PWC published this report: Expansion Seen for Global Outsourcing Market

Not surprisingly a strong growth is foreseen in the market, happening in parallel with a transformation of the providers’ space.

Competition to India from Eastern Europe, Latin America and other Asian countries is growing, but Indian providers apparently don’t feel the heat. Nearshore is also mentioned as a strong trend.

Offshore call centres here to stay, says Computer Business Reviews.

I wonder where is the news.

The recent comeback of some centers from India to inshore or nearshore location, as well as the political pressure against offshore centers are grabbing the headlines. But declaring offshore centers dead is as wrong as declaring that all centers will go offshore.

The call center market offers today more options than ever before. And every delivery model (inshore, offshore, nearshore, whatevershore) has its advantages and drawbacks. There is no one model that is better for everything.

Buyers should spend some time researching the right partner and location for their call center needs. This is some research they need to make:

• Is the process to be outsourced documented and standardized? If it’s not inshore may be better. Or find a prtner with a strong and proven methodology for starting up and running new services.
• What are the skills needed (language, technical, …)? Assess the skills in the potential location/partner you are evaluating.  Ask to be involved in the recruitment process.
• How much time and effort are you prepared to invest in starting up and managing the operation? Small and lean providers may be cheaper and more flexible, but may require a stronger support from the client.

When we discuss about outsourcing and in particular offshore outsourcing, we often discuss about the cost of salary. In a previous post I showed how an outsourcer’s labor costs can vary  dramatically when changing countries. Even within Europe.

But cutting the labor cost by half does not mean the end cost can also be reduced by 50%. Other costs needs to be considered. In a typical inshore call center end cost can be roughly 2 times the cost of the agent.

Of course this varies between locations (e.g. UK vs. Italy) but for the sake of discussion, let’s assume the hourly cost of salary for our center is 10 € and that we can charge the client 20 €. The additional 10 €, in addition to the outsourcer’s margin, pay a long list of other costs.

These costs are often very similar between where in the world your center is located and, in most cases, savings on a cost item are compensated by additional costs on another. Let’s see some of these costs.

Rents: renting an office in an offshore location may be cheaper than renting in central London. But it is often not very different if you need a facility with proper electrical and network wiring. The stock of this kind of building tends to be limited and overpriced in most offshore locations.

Telecom: These days, thanks to the widespread adoption of Voice Over IP, phone costs are not very different between offshore and nearshore centers. On the other end Internet connectivity can still be quite pricey.

In our case, with more than 1.000 concurrent calls during peak hours, Internet was not reliable enough to sustain all our voice traffic. So we had to invest in a dedicated international link. And this is a cost that adds to the overheads.

Management: the cost of management can vary greatly between different offshore centers. Pure offshore players hire local managers, whose cost is lower than expatriates. Other players relocate managers from western countries in order to bring in more expertise.

We took this second approach, because we thought it was better for our clients and helped us support our warp-speed growth. But this adds to the costs as a relocated manager is much more expensive than one recruited locally.

Other infrastructure and G&A costs: all other costs tend to be very similar between countries. You will spend less for cleaning the office (a labor intensive task) but you will spend more for PCs (offshore markets are usually less efficient than western markets). You will spend less for office furniture, but you will need to buy a backup power generator.

Overall the som of all these costs do not vary much between countries.

So what’s the cost saving from offshore outsourcing on the bottom line?

If we assume that in a developed country 50% of the cost for outsourcing services is the cost of agents’ salaries, and that the other 50% is not varying sensibly between countries, every 10% saved on personnel translates in a cost saving of 5% for the client.

So, moving a service from a western country to Romania may a cost saving on personnel (salary + taxes) around 75%. But the real cost saving in terms of overall costs is more in the range of 30-40% .

AT Kearney published the 2009 revision of the Global Services Location Index.

Romania posts a strong growth from the 33rd position last year to this year’s 19th position. Romania and Bulgaria are mentioned as the low cost champions of the European Union. Bulgaria has a leadership in cost here, but it can’t match the breadth of languages offered by Romania.

For now in XL World we are still feeling a competitive advantage of Romania for Multilingual Outsourcing. It’s still one of the very few countries where you can build Offshore Services in multiple languages.

Extra: Outsourcing actually creates U.S. jobs, study finds – MSN Money.

This article suggests that outsourcing might actually create jobs.

A few days ago I was comparing labour costs on the Eurostat’s web site with a client.
He had operations in UK, Spain and Poland. While XL World’s BPO centers are in Romania and Albania.

I realized that labour costs are cut (almost exactly) by half at every step between these countries.

• UK: 4.000 €
• Spain: 2.000 €
• Poland: 1.000 €
• Romania: 500 €
• Albania: 250 €

And every one of these countries has its own value proposition in terms of outsourcing:

• UK: excellent infrastructure and know-how
• Spain: lowest-cost western country
• Poland: first eastern country to enter EU
• Romania: current price leader in EU for multilingual support
• Albania (and others in the southern baltic area): lowest cost emerging european country

It may look as if in this ‘ecosystem’ the smaller fishes are eating jobs from the larger ones. But, as the outsourcing market is still growing fast overall, in this case I suspect the whole is greater than the sum of all parts. Forrester predicts that total spending on BPO in EU will rise from €11.0 billion in 2006 to €18.9 billion in 2011.

Barack Obamas crackdown on US tax dodgers is just beginning | Business | guardian.co.uk .

While I find natural to protect jobs at home, I wonder how restrictions on outsourcing may be applied in this globalized economy.

First of all, I dispute the whole notion of an “American Company”. I wonder how many of american companies’ shareholders are not American.

Also, will IBM UK’s decision to outsource to South Africa mean that the parent company in the US will be hit?

And what about captive centers? IBM, GE and others are huge employers in India. Will they be discriminated simply for having a subsidiary outside of the US? Or because they have a subsidiary in a low-cost market?

My impression is that this legislation will be very hard to formulate and enforce.

Phone costs reductions

It is undisputable that VOIP has reduced the phone bills of call center outsourcers. In the last 4 years the cost of 1 minute of a national call decreased by 50% reaching a level well below 1 euro cent. And the even better thing is that calling all Western Europe now has the same cost as calling nationally. The cost saving in the same period on internationa call has reached 90%.

The table below shows the cost of a minute in euro cents for a center with a high volume of calls.

Call costs for a call center

Higher scalability

But VOIP didn’t reduce phone costs only. Also the whole infrastructure is now cheaper.
If a call center that generates 1.000 concurrent calls uses ISDN for termination, it needs to invest thousands of euros in equipment. And a similar investment must be done by the service provider. 

If VOIP is used, scalability is extremely easier: increasing the number of lines requires only some additional bandwidth and some processing power on gateway servers. Both low-cost commodities.

But this cost saving dodn’t come free: quality of the phone service suffered greatly. And the most relevant issue is not the quality of the voice sound: offshore call centers need to use high compression codecs (G.729 or GSM) anyway.

Higher call set-up time

One of the main problems that we need to tackle is the increase in call set-up times. Today it is common to wait more than 10 seconds before a call is established. And, because of the high number of calls made by an agent, all these wait times compound to multiple minutes every hour.

Reduction of ASR

The ASR (Answer Seizure Ratio) is the number of answered calls divided by the total number of originated calls. With the conversion of providers’ networks to VOIP we see a gradual decrease of this percentage.

In this case the call center must increase the number of attempts for each contact, therefore decreasing agents’ productivity.

Is going back to ISDN a solution?

Unfortunately these factors are largely independent from the technology used to connect to the phone service provider. In fact, even if we use ISDN to connect, it is more and more likely that the provider’s internal network has been largely converted to VOIP.

An this is even more likely for international calls. Due to the high price pressure, all telcos are now forced to trade off quality for cost saving.

What can call senters do?

In addition to doing a thorough due diligence when choosing telcos, it is increasingly more important to use more than one provider. Even the largest and well known companies often have problems on their network. Maybe only on a few destinations.

We now need to have an active management of call termination, diverting different routes to the best performing provider at any given time.

Another tool that is now essential is a good predictive dialer. These systems can increase productivity in a call center increasing the number of dialed calls by means of statistic algorithms that compensate both the ASR and the call set-up time.