Business Analysis and Advice

Business Analysis and Advice

There has been much debate over the subject of banks moving their jobs

from call centers in the UK to new Call Centers in other mainly

eastern countries. The prospect of offshoring is not new to companies

but there is always a large debate on whether it can lead to good or

bad in the long run, with companies taking up positions on both sides

of the argument. Offshoring can sometimes be labelled as outsourcing,

but in fact the two are very different.

Outsourcing (or BPO - business process outsourcing) has been the

national solution, contracting the administration of a company to a

third party, frequently transferring staff and systems in the process.

The outsourcer can generate savings through more efficient processes,

management and economies of scale if the business is consolidated with

other similar processes from similar businesses.

Offshoring is the permanent or long-term relocation of operations to

low-cost countries such as India. Other countries that have been used

for offshoring recently are South Africa, China and the Philippines as

well as Eastern Europe. The main advantages are lower operational

costs through relatively low local wages, good availability of

well-qualified staff, and (sometimes) time zone advantages.

From this debate Natwest Bank have released a new advert showing that

they have 'people not robots' on the end of their phones to talk,

direct telephone lines to each branch, and that they haven't moved

their call center operations to India. India is now the most common

country that is referred to when talking about moving jobs offshore,

but there are other places that the jobs go to including the

Philippinesand China, and others. In one piece of research done by the

DTI (1) on the UK's contact center industry, it shows a comparison

between countries for their key competition markets and compares

countries such as Ireland, The Netherlands, but also usual places such

as India and South Africa. In the report they showed that call center

jobs in Ireland had the same basic costs with only salaries and few