MANILA, PHILIPPINES Call-center industry expands overseas, adding to job losses in United States

The United States has lost 250,000 call-center jobs to India and the Philippines since 2001.
MANILA, Philippines (AP) -- It's 9 p.m. as Tim Lavin walks into his office, but his staff greets him with "Good morning, sir."
At Ambergris Solutions, most of the work starts long after rush hour, as lights wink out in other high rises in Manila's Ortigas business district. On the other side of the world, the company's American clients are just beginning their day.
Behind Lavin, senior vice president for operations for one of the top Philippine call-center companies, a steady stream of 20-something recent college grads scurry to work stations on six floors of the 42-story Discovery Suites hotel and office complex.
The company is among 45 Filipino and foreign players in the Philippines' booming call-center business, which has generated 30,000 jobs in just five years here. The relatively good pay makes it an attractive job, despite the hours.
Growth trend
Trade Secretary Manuel Roxas II touted it as a growth industry in October when the world's leading billing-and-customer-service operator, Cincinnati-based Convergys Corp., opened its first two call centers in the Philippines.
From "almost unexplored territory" five years ago, Roxas projects the industry will employ 100,000 Filipinos by 2005, providing a variety of customer and employee care services to Americans: handling call-in queries and technical support; e-mail, online chat, travel and consumer services; and medical and legal transcriptions.
Meanwhile, the United States has lost 250,000 call-center jobs to India and the Philippines since 2001, according to Technology Marketing Corp., a Norwalk, Conn.-based company specializing in call centers and telemarketing.
That's part of a much larger trend. Forrester Research estimated last year that 3.3 million service industry jobs, including call centers, and $136 billion in wages, will move to countries like India, Russia, China and the Philippines.
Filipino advantages
The Philippines' chief competitor in attracting call-center business is India, but the government and industry leaders say the Philippines has some advantages: a cultural affinity with the United States, its former colonial master, and its relatively cheap labor and modern telecommunications infrastructure.
Another difference is that Filipinos speak Americanized English as a second language, "while the Indians may speak the Queen's English," Crawford said.
Just last month, Dell Inc. said that in response to complaints it would no longer route tech support calls from some U.S. corporate computing customers to India, and instead handle them in the United States. Dell would not discuss the complaints, though callers are known to have been dissatisfied with agents' inability -- or lack of authority -- to solve their problems.
Learning U.S. culture
As a hedge against such troubles, the Philippines has a Call Center Academy that focuses on teaching English proficiency, as well as American culture, call-center technology and sales, telemarketing, and customer service skills.
The trade and industry department says a Philippine agent, with starting pay of about 12,000 to 15,000 pesos ($218 to $273) monthly, gets only a fifth of an American counterpart but more than what a new bank teller would get here.
The department also says that Filipino call-center workers stay an average of 2.5 years on the job, compared with about eight to nine months for Americans.
Paula Angela Villadolid, training director for Convergys, said the company doesn't look specifically for an American accent, just one understandable to an American customer.
More important, she said, is understanding American culture to get a perspective on customers' needs and the types of responses they require.
At Ambergris, workers are given USA Today and the most recent Texas travel guide to read between calls. They watch the previous day's TV news from a Texas network during breaks in case conversation with a customer veers to current events.
Operations manager Katherine Ann Fernando said it can help knowing the weather, the top stories -- even how the Dallas Cowboys or Texas Rangers are doing.
"We can't afford to sound like we don't know anything about Texas," she said.