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IN an ironic twist of sorts, the San Jose Mercury News, the American
newspaper that won the Pulitzer Prize for its 1986 investigative
reporting on corruption during the Marcos regime, which signaled the
beginning of the end for the conjugal dictatorship, has become the
latest US company to offshore its customer services management to
Philippine call centers,
MediaNews Group, one of the largest newspaper
companies in the United States with 57 dailies across 12 states, has
outsourced the customer care of San Jose Mercury News to APAC
Customer Services Inc.
APAC employs some 4,000 college-educated, fluent
English-speaking, “accent neutral” Filipinos in three contact
centers in Quezon City and Muntinlupa.
Its Philippine call hubs will initially provide
customer care and back-office solutions to San Jose Mercury News,
Contra Costa Times and Oakland Tribune. The services will include
fielding inbound customer calls, subscriber retention as well as
delivery and billing inquiries.
This latest bit of good news on the business
process outsourcing front was bared by lone Catanduanes Rep. Joseph
Santiago who is chairman of the House committee on information and
communications technology and an enthusiastic backer of the booming
BPO industry which is seen as a key driver of economic and
employment growth in the Philippines.
“We expect MediaNews’ decision to start
offshoring some back-office services to the Philippines to drive the
group’s competitors to eventually do the same in order to stay
economically competitive on account of growing internet use”,
Santiago noted.
APAC is a global customer care solutions
provider for companies in the healthcare, financial services,
publishing, business services, communications, travel and
entertainment industries. And this is not the first media catch for
the company. In publishing alone, APAC has almost 80 other newspaper
clients from the US on its books.
Global BPO providers based in the US have been
crediting their Philippine operations as among the most productive
worldwide, largely owing to the country’s ample supply of highly
cost-effective human resources.
Philippine call centers are projected to have
more than 300,000 seats with up to 506,500 Filipinos fully engaged,
and set to yield as much as $7.3 billion in annual revenues by 2010.
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It’s rare that what amounts to a person’s
holiday pictures are splashed on the front page of a national
newspaper. But then again, President Gloria Arroyo is not any
person—and in the perennial conspiratorial political climate that
exists in the Philippines anything is game.
But as the President’s legal adviser Atty.
Romy Macalintal pointed out to us, the photographs of the President
and First Gentleman Mike Arroyo enjoying a round of golf in Shenzhen—allegedly
facilitated by top executives of ZTE, the Chinese company at the
epicenter of the raging national broadband network controversy—is
not so much a smoking gun as a damp squib.
Counters Macalintal: “The photographs are not
evidence to justify the opening by the Senate of the ZTE case, nor
are they evidence of the baseless charge of anomaly versus PGMA or
FG. If ever the photos are evidence that they were at a golf course
in China—period! It’s not evidence of a secret meeting, not
evidence of the ZTE deal and not evidence of any contract sealed.
“As a matter of fact the contract in question
was cancelled by the President herself. So whoever says that the
photo is evidence of an anomaly is merely trying to take for a ride
those who will buy this unfounded story. It’s mere political noise
with no factual or legal basis”.
We presume there Atty. Macalintal rests his
case.
bizzfizz_98@yahoo.com
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