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DAVAO CITY—The
world’s largest data-collection company put up its
second multimillion-peso offshoring and outsourcing
(O&O) operation here in the Philippines, six years after
it opened its Cebu call center.
The
Utah-based Western Wats signed the memorandum of
agreement (MOA) with the NCCC Mall, which leased its
4,700-square-meter fourth floor for the call-center
office after the mall got the approval from the board of
the Philippine Export Processing Zone Authority.
Jose
Antonio San Gabriel, president of Western Wats-Philippines,
told a press conference Wednesday at the NCCC Mall after
they signed the MOA, that their decision to expand to
Davao City
was prompted by “promising and encouraging remarks about
the big supply of human resources around this place.”
The
company said it would start operation in early July to
catch up with the volume of transactions, including
those that would be generated by the campaign for the US
presidential elections.
San Gabriel
said the company would spend between P60 million and P70
million “to kick off the operation here, and this does
not include yet the operation expenses, such as the
salaries of the agents.”
Derek
Rice, operation manager, said the call center would hire
an initial batch of close to 500 agents to do the same
market researches and data collection that the company
was known for the last 21 years, servicing more than 300
client-corporations that many belong to the Fortune’s
Global 500 companies.
Its
clients also include
US
government agencies, auto-manufacturing firms,
advertising outfits, media organizations, print
publications and universities, to midsized grocers,
small private businesses and nonprofit groups.
The
company would eventually expand to 1,000 seats by 2009.
A
company brief said the Western Wats-Philippines is an
outbound-type of O&O, doing market research “to help
companies create better business plans and determine how
to launch a new product or service, or fine-tune
existing products and services.”
“We
specialize in quantitative research-data collection via
live telephone interview, automated telephony and the
Web,” it said. All these, San Gabriel said, “set us
apart from any other call centers because we are not
selling anything, we do not answer irate callers, we
don’t do technical support, we don’t have shifting
schedules.”
Andre
Joseph Fournier, former chairman of the Committee on
Information and Communication Technology of the Davao
City Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said the Western
Wats-Philippines is the fifth big call center to come in
lately in Davao City.
“We
would expect more to come soon, and we have already
gathered our landowners and the big call-center
companies in Manila and Cebu to a property forum [on
February 29] to appraise each other of the need of the
call centers and the benefits to landowners to open up
IT parks or put up IT buildings,” Fournier said.
The five
O&O companies and several other smaller call centers
have employed about 8,000 personnel here and Fournier
said more residents could be tapped anytime.
He said
that the Davao Region “is a very rich source of
call-center agents that would be putting up their
operations here,” adding that the big percentage alone
of agents from Davao and currently working in the Manila
and Cebu O&O companies would attest to the potential
rich source of agents coming from here. |
