In the past few years, the business process outsourcing/call center industry in the Philippines has experienced a significant boom. A lot of companies worldwide established their call centers here because of the lower labor costs/overhead and the abundant number of English speaking workers. Before, Filipinos searching for jobs had to wait for years to get employed and wait even some more to get a raise. But because of the huge demand for call center representatives, job hunters nowadays have an easier time landing good paying jobs at call centers. (last I heard starting salaries range from P 13,000-20,000, that’s for those who have no CSR experience yet, the offer is greater for those who are experienced already)
However, a couple of days ago NBC Nightly News (now airing on Crime Suspense Channel/RPN 9) reported that many of the US companies are bringing the offshore jobs back to the US, mainly due to the increasing number of frustrated and irate customers. Many of them complain about the inadequacy of the call center representatives' technical skills and their ineptness in English.
Here are some of the horror stories at call centers I found on Youtube, most of them are from India according to the uploaders of the videos, but hey we never know ;) :
To avoid customer backlash, a growing number of US companies (eg. Jet Blue, AAA, etc.) are bringing the jobs back to the US and are now shifting to US home-based call center agents. Like an offshore call center, home-based contact centers are cheap. However, it is more advantageous for the US companies to run home-based contact centers because they can easily oversee the operations because the workers are from the US, and on top of that they can be assured that customer misunderstandings/disagreements would be kept to a minimum because the agents are native English speakers. According to NBC Nightly News report, there are already about 150,000 home-based agents in the US and their numbers are steadily growing. Experts think that this trend will continue and the numbers of US home-based agents will continue to grow in the coming years.
I think that this move plus the imminent US recession will hamper the growth of the business process outsourcing industry, specifically the call center industry, in the Philippines. I'm not belittling our agents and the capabilities of our workers, but if we want to stay competitive we should start to address this problem. The BPO/call centers here should be more stringent in screening the job applicants. They should provide a lot of trainings and seminars to their employees that would equip them with more skills and hone their English speaking skills. Filipinos shouldn't rest on their laurels just because they’re working in a fast-growing, high-paying industry. As we all know, the business climate is dynamic, everything changes fast, what could be the hottest industry today would be gone tomorrow.
In the past few years, the business process outsourcing/call center industry in the 
