PUEBLO DE PANAY, Roxas City—American consulting company Performance Consulting Group Inc. (PCG) will test the waters of the business-process outsourcing (BPO) industry of this city with its third contact-center expansion here.
PCG will operate its third ePerformax Contact Center & BPO company in the country in the Pueblo de Panay TechnoPark in December 2017.
“What we want to build here in Roxas City is the next generation of BPO that provides solid professional careers for people, instead of the more transaction-based customer-service jobs,” said Teresa Hartsaw, president and CEO of ePerformax Contact Center & BPO.
“The basic customer support services that have fueled the growth trajectory the BPO industry experienced over the last 10 years will be replaced over the next 10 years by customer self-service options and automated customer-interactive systems. The call centers, as we know them today, will disappear,” she added. ePerformax Contact Center & BPO will be the first BPO company investing in the 7,500-square-meter Pueblo de Panay Technopark. The American company will occupy three floors of the first five-story building to be built in Pueblo de Panay TechnoPark, which is expected to be completed by October 2017.
“We are honored and excited to have ePerformax become one of our flagship businesses at the Pueblo de Panay TechnoPark, which is also the first Philippine Economic Zone Authority registered IT [information technology] park on Northern Panay Island,” said Jose Nery Ong, president and CEO of Pueblo de Panay Inc., adding the building will be named after the American company as “ePerformax Center.”
ePerformax said it will offer 300 seats per floor with three working shifts, meaning a total of 2,700 employment of BPO agents.
“We are looking at a total employment target of 5,000 here in the long run,” Hartsaw said. Hartsaw said the Roxas City-based ePerformax will serve as back-office support for a new business travel company called Upside.com. The company has started recruiting and training employees housed inside Capiz State University (CapSut), Hartsaw added.
“They will undergo a six-month apprenticeship. After three months of training there [CapSut], they will go to Manila and finish their training on travel consultancy,” she said.
Ong said they are currently looking for non-voice and commerical locators to occupy the remaining two floors of the ePerformax Center that would complement the operations of ePerformax Contact Center & BPO.
Ong said the development of the TechnoPark will be done in phases, depending on market needs and growth.
“I understand ePerformax is just starting to test the waters and if we could expand based on their needs, then we are more willing to do so. The TechnoPark expansion will depend on market construction,” said Ong, who also heads the Capiz Information and Communications Technology (ICT) council.
Mike Tanner, ePerformax Roxas City General Manager, said they chose Roxas City as the location for their third expansion in the country because of its “dedicated and passionate ICT” council.
“Everything is so organized here and the ICT council really know what they wanted,” Tanner said when asked why they chose Roxas City among all the Next Wave Cities. “It is private-driven. When you get so much government involvement, things get hard.”
In April 2016, Roxas City was hailed as one of the emerging locations that show high potential in hosting Information Technology-Business Process Management (IT-BPM) companies in the country by the Information Technology and Business Process Association of the Philippines (IBPAP) and the Department of Information and Communication Technology.
Other “next wave cities” include Balanga, Batangas, Iriga, Laoag, Legazpi, Puetro Princesa, Tarlac, Tuguegarao and Zamboanga.
Hartsaw said they don’t have future expansion plans yet to other provinces in the country. “We just want to focus here [Roxas City] first.”
ePerformax built its first center in Manila (2002) followed by its Cebu center in 2006. ePerformax provides inbound customer-care support, technical support and back-office processing services to its clients.
“ePerformax has primarily focused its operations on providing the highest levels of customer service and BPO to a select group of Fortune 500 and other global companies to support their English-speaking customers in the US, Canada and Australia,” ePerformax said.