Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

Despite the fact that many organizations are moving their contact center operations back to US soil, the reality is that many other organizations still find that outsourcing to an overseas contractor or even establishing their own operations in another country is a smart and strategic business move. As a result, many countries try and position themselves as the best choice for contact center operations and outsourcing.

 

One such country that is attempting to expand its offerings and grow its contact center industry is Egypt. While this area has yet to appear much on the radar, the country’s leaders have applied a new focus to its efforts in attracting American companies with its contact center offerings.

 

Since 2000, around six call centers offering professional outsourcing services to local and international clients are now operating in Egypt. This emerging industry is growing exponentially and now accounts for roughly 3000 agent positions. Experts predict that this number will triple by 2009. According to A.T. Kearny outsourcing index, Egypt is ranked twelfth in the world as an offshoring outsourcing destination.

 

Datamonitor has high hopes for the call center industry in Egypt. Datamonitor Report considered Egypt as one of the fastest growing call center locations and anticipates that the demand for Egyptian outsourced offshore call centers will grow by 50 percent compound annual growth rate by 2009.

 

This growth is expected to be the result of the country’s competitive advantages such as: highly skilled workforce; competitive cost of labor; multilingual skills, neutral accents; government support; friendly investment environment; geographic advantages; and low cost and advanced telecommunications infrastructure.

 

The Egyptian call center market positions its greatest competitive advantage as providing services in eight different languages. These languages include Arabic, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian and Spanish. This can provide the country with a decisive lead when competing for the multilingual markets.

While there are a number of call centers currently operations in Egypt and serving organizations and customers worldwide, Raya Contact Center is at the forefront of this strong and emerging market. Raya is ISO certified and operates from a new building with a state-of-the-art telecom infrastructure accommodating for 800 seats powered by more than 850 multilingual and ICSA certified agents.

Although the Egyptian call center market appears to have a lot to offer companies considering offshoring or outsourcing their operations, organizations will have to carefully consider the legal and political climate in addition to the economic and labor factors before establishing operations there or anywhere else. There is still risk involved with operating overseas and any organization making such a consideration must do so with their eyes wide open.

 

Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMC and has also written for eastbiz.com. To see more of her articles, please visit Susan J. Campbell’s columnist page.