It has been said that half of the global revenue by the year 2016 will come from non-voice operations such as digital content services and medical transcription. Similar study also shows that 42% of the global revenue in the next ten years for an industry that is very well thriving in countries like India and the Philippines, will come from virtual contact centers or other voice services. Contact center operations particularly in the Philippines will have outnumbered non-voice accounts, which comes from the the massive workforce available every year. Seeing this statistics, the BPO industry is striving hard to be competitive each year, and as country, there is a need to fight harder to stay afloat.

Despite the recent global economic downfall, the outsourcing industry is still growing, in fact, the BPO companies here in the Philippines have expanded their businesses outside Metro Manila and Cebu. The two places where the industry has been founded first and is still prosperous up to this day. The government has also pledged to help the industry by approving a 62-million peso financial support as support to back-up the needs of BPO sector in the country. The revenue of the BPO industry is also estimated at $11 billion, and more importantly, more than 600,000 job vacancies will be open to the public.

There are still threats despite these progressive moves, the virtual contact center industry experts and officials warned that the country must not take this challenge easy because of its success in the  outsourcing business. Countries such as China, Vietnam and even Sri Lanka are now so close to the Philippines when it comes to delivering various call center services. China generates more than a million engineering graduates alone each year, while Philippine universities and colleges produce only 500,000 graduates, and those numbers are the total number of graduates from all forms of discipline; and that might be the big reason why. The Philippines may boast of a better grasp of the English language, nations like Sri Lanka and Vietnam have intensified all its efforts and increased its training of the English language program all the while offering lesser pay to employers than Filipinos.

So how do the BPO industry in the country rise above all others? The main concern now is to match the skills learned by the graduates to the skills needed by the industry. This will pave the way to better customer service and quality delivery of the commodities and in turn will increase productivity of BPO companies in the country. A more aggressive and proactive marketing of the industry to the locals in the country will also open up new opportunities and an access to larger talent pool. Intensification and increased awareness of the Filipino people on the value of education especially in the fields of Information Technology, Communications Engineering and Computer Science. This way there will be a wider understanding of the market paving the way to more voice and non-voice BPO services while exploring new markets which these services can be rendered.