As BPO in Nicaragua has developed, the young veterans of the industry are now emerging as the new executive leaders, pioneering innovative ways to create even more management talent.

The post Nicaragua is Fertile Ground for BPO Leadership Development appeared first on Nearshore Americas.

These top-level tips come from BPO providers with successful youth recruitment campaigns, offering great advice for keeping the new generations invested in your company.

The post 5 Pro Tips for Attracting Young Talent When Recruiting for BPO appeared first on Nearshore Americas.

Site selection consultants and experts from key vendors explore how dialogues have changed in the process since Trump took office.

The post Nearshore Site Selection is Now a Much Deeper Conversation Thanks to Trump appeared first on Nearshore Americas.

Sitel has trademarked the term "botshore", adding a new buzzword to the world of nearshore, offshore, and onshore outsourcing.

The post “Botshore” is the New Shore, According to Sitel appeared first on Nearshore Americas.

Humberto Andrade from Accenture and Gordon White from The Social Client explain why chatbots have to be part of any serious solution, but are still lacking in adoption rates.

The post What is Holding Back Chatbots from Widespread Nearshore Adoption? appeared first on Nearshore Americas.

The people of Nicaragua understand the growing need for English skills as a means to find well-paying jobs, but the government has more work to do for the BPO industry.

The post The Nearshore English Evolution: Nicaragua Population Under-Resourced yet Highly Motivated appeared first on Nearshore Americas.

Raul Navarro, Chief Operating Officer – Americas at Sitel, shares his views of Colombia and Brazil, explaining how each nation’s hurdles are impacting BPO.

The post Executive View: Sitel COO Finding Strong BPO in Colombia but Brazil Economy Remains “On Hold” appeared first on Nearshore Americas.

Nearshore Americas took a trip to Nicaragua to take an objective look at what is really going on in the country and how the BPO sector is evolving.

The post Four Days in Nicaragua: What’s Really Driving this Unique BPO Market?  appeared first on Nearshore Americas.

As BPO in Nicaragua has developed, the young veterans of the industry are now emerging as the new executive leaders, pioneering innovative ways to create even more management talent.

The post Nicaragua is Fertile Ground for BPO Leadership Development appeared first on Nearshore Americas.

These top-level tips come from BPO providers with successful youth recruitment campaigns, offering great advice for keeping the new generations invested in your company.

The post 5 Pro Tips for Attracting Young Talent When Recruiting for BPO appeared first on Nearshore Americas.

Philippe Riveron, CEO of Learning Tribes, explains how Sitel and his company are innovating in the training sphere, retaining human emotion in a chatbot-filled world.

The post Q&A: Learning Tribes Takes Sitel Training Practices to Emotional Levels appeared first on Nearshore Americas.

The new VPs are Chris Hollamby (pictured), a BPO executive with over 30 years' experience in the fintech space, and Matt Fry, who has 20 years' experience delivering tech-centric solutions for Global 1000 companies.

The post Sitel Hires New VPs To Expand FinTech and Manufacturing Expertise appeared first on Nearshore Americas.

These top-level tips come from BPO providers with successful youth recruitment campaigns, offering great advice for keeping the new generations invested in your company.

The post Recap: 5 Pro Tips for Attracting Young Talent When Recruiting for BPO appeared first on Nearshore Americas.

The Kunshan center will provide customer services through both voice and WeChat in Chinese language.

The post Sitel Launches Operations in China with Partner 800 TeleServices appeared first on Nearshore Americas.

Cali, Colombia, continues to grow its IT sector as it looks to attract more BPO, ITO and KPO interest. Invest Pacific says 2018 saw 20 new projects, 10 of them with new companies, added to Cali's investments and moves like Sitel's 2017 opening in the city are adding to the interest.

The post A Youthful Population and Focus on Outsourcing Power Cali to New Heights appeared first on Nearshore Americas.

It went from being one of the safest destinations in Central America to unexpectedly chaotic and dangerous – stunning would-be investors and attracting significant global attention as a country mired in deep societal and political conflict.

Years of stability in Nicaragua were rocked when an unexpected uprising against the country’s government kicked off in April 2018, leaving hundreds dead and triggering a period of uncertainty.

Some Stay, Some Flee

The turmoil caused a number of BPO operators to reduce headcount or shut-down altogether. Concentrix, for example, reportedly slimmed down significantly during last 18 months, moving some of its workers from Nicaragua to operations established in Costa Rica. Other workers were reportedly laid-off. When asked this week about its Nicaragua strategy, Concentrix declined comment.

But despite the country suffering a sharp fall in foreign investment, some outsourcing providers – largely in customer care and services – are signaling their belief that conditions have improved considerably. BPO provider IBEX Global told Nearshore Americas that the nation is stronger than ever and plans to launch a second site in Managua this month.

“We managed through the crisis and came out ten times stronger as a company through that,” Bob Dechant, the company’s CEO, says.

“In April 2018 the unrest hit and for four months it put some challenges in the ability to get people around town with the protests. We were able to navigate really well with that – putting people in hotels, helping our agents get to and from work,” Dechant reports. “Our clients are important so we are committed, and it would’ve been easy for them to pull out. ”

Dechant believes that approximately 3,000 agents positions were lost in the entire Managua BPO ecosystem, during the months that followed the initial street conflicts.

Trouble in the Latin American nation – population 6.5 million – kicked off when pro-government groups violently crushed a small demonstration against reforms to Nicaragua’s pension system. Street protests then erupted against the regime of President Daniel Ortega and more violence from police and government-backed paramilitaries then created a period of instability not seen since the Sandinista revolution almost 40 years ago.

Clients Remain Supportive 

Dechant adds that despite the complications, they managed to see the troubles as an opportunity to build trust with clients. “This was seen as enormous opportunity so rather than follow the path of least resistance, our clients realized how important it was in keeping that economy going,” he says. “We have clients who said they were really committed to staying in this market as long as we can,  rather than overreact, and that has paid off.”

Carlos Medina, the country manager for Opticall BPO, which supports optical services organizations in the United States notes that maintaining continuity in operations has remained crucial.  “It is our job as BPO leaders to guarantee the sustainability of our business and enable BCP actions when necessary,” he says.

A sense of calm has returned to Managua, according to multiple sources. Although the regime of Ortega remains firmly in tact, only time will tell if Nicaragua will be able to reclaim the title of ‘safest’ country in Central America.

Sitel, one of the true trailblazers to set up in Nicaragua back in 2008, is also issuing a strong vote of confidence around a resurgent Nicaragua.  (During those years, Convergys also arrived in the country). Sitel’s first Nicaragua call center opened in one of Managua’s few skyscrapers, called Invercasa, in April 2008. Due to increasing demand for capacity, Sitel expanded twice and ultimately added a second site at the former U.S. Embassy compound in historic old Managua in January 2009. In succeeding years, Nicaragua formed the cornerstone of Sitel’s Nearshore strategy.

Mike Small, CEO of Sitel‘s operations in the Americas, reports that Sitel’s headcount has increased since the protests broke out. “We have actually grown our clients that are there [in Nicaragua] over the last six months,” he says. “At the time of the crisis we had around 2,500–2,600 employees – now we’re over 3,000.”

Clearly, Sitel remains firmly commited. “Nicaragua continues to be a high performing market, and we expect to continue to take advantages to grow in the market,” adds Small.

Managing through Turbulence

Getting through the difficult months required responsive leadership teams, according to both Small and Dechant. First were the practicalities. Small tells Nearshore Americas that the company immediately ordered over 300 cots, had shower facilities set up and provided food service on a 24/7 basis. Means of communications were provided to employees in order to make contact with friends and family. Dechant adds that making sure travel was available in the form of taxis to get agents back home when there were delays, roadblocks or protests was also helpful.

The context of the crisis, and the fact that Nicaragua remains an emerging economy, also played a factor in how client relationships were managed.  “The first and foremost thing is open, honest and transparent conversations with our clients and making sure we are building contingency strategies,” adds Small.

While Dechant says: “Our leadership team was second-to-none. If you have weak leadership navigating through crisis, you’re going to lose. I believed in the leadership we had and now we are doing better than ever.”

The post As BPOs Report a Resurgence, Is Nicaragua in the Clear? appeared first on Nearshore Americas.

Contact centers and BPO providers in the Nearshore and throughout the world are struggling to meet data protection guidelines, such as those issued by the Payment Card Industry (PCI), as literally millions of employees attempt to turn their homes into makeshift offices.

Scaling to meet the demand by issuing hardware to workers is one thing, but ensuring that companies are completely in line with PCI compliance – especially those with “level one” certification – is turning out to be a much more complex undertaking.

At the beginning of March the PCI Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) issued a series of updates on the risks that the COVID-19 pandemic poses to PCI-compliance, as well as recommendations on how to maintain policies in remote work environments.

“All staff should receive security awareness training that emphasizes the importance of data security and be knowledgeable in the organization’s security policies and processes that apply to remote working. For example, policies and procedures should clearly prohibit any unauthorized copying, moving, sharing, or storing of payment card data in remote environments. Remote staff additionally need to be aware of their physical surroundings, taking care to prevent sensitive information from being viewed by unauthorized persons,” recommended the PCI SSC last week, while recognizing that some controls might be challenging to implement.

Nearshore Americas spoke with three BPO providers and an industry analyst to understand how the industry is adapting to this new reality and the potential security risks that come with it.

“In the operations that are not directly managed by banks, it is very possible there are PCI violations going on because there is remote access from other locations. This is something that needs to be revised,” said Alejandra Romero, a Mexico City-based industry analyst with over twenty years of experience, including a 16-year run as a chief operating officer at Qualfon.

For Romero, the pandemic has led to a tidal wave of disruption and a level of disorganization that had never really been considered as a possibility for many BPO operators. Because of that, most Business Continuity Plans (BCPs) were developed without imaging the current scenario where huge volumes would have to be migrated to remote sites in a very short period of time.  The high volume of agents that have been moved to work-at-home introduces a series of IT, security and monitoring challenges that are acutely important for contact centers with clients who require PCI adherence.

Basic PCI Security Measures

In an ideal scenario, contact centers and BPO providers that move agents to at-home locations should be providing those agents with company-issued equipment, which should already include updated security software to protect against privacy breaches. The companies’ local networks should also be designed to support those off-site connections.

Hui Wu-Curtis, President and COO at World Connection, said that her company moved all of its 700 agents to their homes. World Connection has sites in Guatemala City and Boise, Idaho. In Guatemala, the government has implemented hard social distancing measures and has closed contact centers that didn’t follow them. “Before this, we didn’t offer a work-at-home option, but we had the infrastructure ready to go, which is why we were able to do it within two days,” Wu-Curtis said.

“We didn’t want any of our employees to use their own equipment, so what we did, we inventoried and sent home company-issued equipment to all of our employees. It has the same security protocols. It’s still a lockdown, we still have monitoring capability. So, everything is the same, systematically.” she added.

One of the world’s largest providers, Sitel, faced similar challenges when deploying Nearshore agents to at-home environments. With presence in Mexico, Nicaragua, Colombia, and Panama, Sitel took advantage of its experience with work-at-home in North America.

Pete Weaklend, Senior Vice President of Solutions and Innovations at Sitel, told Nearshore Americas that leaders implemented work-at-home both with company-issued equipment and with agent devices that pass a requirements test. As of last Thursday (March 26^th), Sitel transitioned 47% of agents in Panama to work from home, and 53% in Colombia. The goal is to reach 70% and 75% of agents working from home, respectively, within a week.

“When agents take home a PC from our site, we establish a secure VPN connection, which ensures that it provides the security and controls we need from a PCI standpoint,” Weaklend said.

“For the agent’s PC solution, we use a Linux bootable USB that completely locks down the agent’s operating system, drivers, ability to print, everything. It opens up a new OS on that PC. It becomes a dumb terminal that is now connected to our network,” he added.

Everise also benefited from having a work-at-home infrastructure built to scale. As the pandemic measures became more stringent around the world, the company’s priority shifted to deploying work-at-home for agents in Kuala Lumpur, Manila, and Guatemala. “As of today, we moved home roughly 71% of our agents globally, the goal for phase one is to reach 82% of the agent population, and then for phase two it would be the remaining positions,” said Amy Grisham, Senior Manager of IT Governance & Compliance at Everise.

Grisham says that the pandemic caught the company in the middle of its PCI-compliance assessment, so the topic was fresh in the minds of leadership.  The work-at-home platform is based on recently developed requirements. Some of the IT security measures include multifactor authentication and data privacy procedures, handled through network segmentation techniques.

The Physical Challenge

Some industry observers have worried that broadband connectivity would become a big challenge for Latin American and Caribbean-based workers, however so far those concerns seem to be unwarranted. Most BPO providers are located in metropolitan areas where the telecommunications infrastructure tends to be reliable and pervasive. Many in the industry are watching carefully to see whether demand for network resources erodes performance. Additionally, some question whether the electrical grid in various locations will endure added strain.

Aside from the broadband and equipment provisioning issues is the biggest worry of all: physical security. PCI-compliance requires very specific physical accommodations. Desk are expected to be clean and uncluttered. “Entry controls” are expected to add an extra dimension of protection that – in the real world of the call center – typically includes security personnel, checking bags and using badges to verify the identity of those entering the floor.

The topic of data protection inside Nearshore call centers is, understandably sensitive. There have been actual breaches, most notably when two call center agents servicing AT&T in Monterrey, Mexico were found in 2015 to have sold personal customer data to an outside third-party. The personal details of almost 280,000 U.S. customers, including “full or partial” Social Security numbers was compromised. (The investigation also resulted in the discovery of violations in the Philippines and Colombia.)

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ordered AT&T to pay a $25 million fine because of the breaches.

How can providers guarantee their agents will not write down credit card information, or snap screen shots on a mobile device, in an environment over which they have no control?

“The physical environment within which an office worker or home worker is taking card payments over the telephone should be effectively monitored, and access controlled,” recommended the PCI SSC on their website last week.

World Connection is considering providing their at-home agents with webcams that could detect unusual activity at the desk level.

“We would try to live stream monitor, or, if the network can’t handle that, then we are going to bounce in to monitor their activity periodically, so they know that at any moment they are going to have random monitoring throughout the day,” Wu-Curtis said.

However, for Alejandra Romero, monitoring via webcams, particularly live streaming, poses a broadband issue everywhere, particularly in a moment where residential networks are strained due to the increased traffic.

For his part, Weaklend recognizes the constraints potentially existing in the “last mile,” an element that is hard for companies to control directly.

“We are using all of the security and confidentiality waivers that the agents sign, the equipment waiver that they sign, all the background check pieces where we can. All those standard things to make sure the employee is aware of this issue,” Weaklend said.

“All of our at-home processes are designed with the same controls that have been certified for us in the US. As far as the actual at-home environment, the ‘can they write something down?’, that has to be covered by the controls that we have around the employee, the trust in the employee. And that goes for all time, including everything we deployed for work-at-home in the US,” he concluded.

The post PCI Compliance Inside the Agent’s Home Become a Major Focus appeared first on Nearshore Americas.

American call center firm Sitel is set to hire 400 agents in Canada’s St. Catharines, a glimmer of hope for the industry battered by a rising wave of automation and COVID-19 travel restrictions.

The new hires will provide customer care services to an American telecom firm, the call center stated in a press release.

To comply with social distancing measures in this age of coronavirus, the BPO provider is restructuring workspaces at the facility in Canada’s Niagara region.

“With the size and space available in our contact center, the new associates will be on the production floor, where we’re implementing strict social distancing policies, as well as rigorous cleaning activities,” said site director Gemma Dale.

Also, every employee will be told to wear a protective mask at the office and work on staggered shifts.

The pandemic is driving demand for customer services, says the BPO, which, in April this year, revealed a plan to hire 10,000 work-at-home agents for its operations across North America.

When Covid-19 led to stringent travel restrictions in St. Catharines earlier in March, Sitel ordered 95% of its agents to operate from home. A month later, it added 200 more employees to its payroll on the back of increased demand for customer care service.

All new positions are full time, says the call center provider, adding that new hires will be trained in the job.

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American BPO provider Sitel has reportedly launched a large-scale expansion program in Colombia, with plans to add as many as 2,000 employees to its payroll.

The expansion plan includes establishing a new call center in Barranquilla and hiring bilingual home-based agents in Medellín and Bucaramanga, according to the country’s investment promotion agency ProColombia.

The BPO provider is hiring not just call center agents, but also analysts, engineers, and support personnel. New members will be added to its workforce in Bogota and Cali as well.

Considering local media reports, Sitel has secured 10 new clients in the Andean country over the past two months. As of now, the BPO has employed 5,000 people across a dozen offices in the country.

Sitel has been operating in Colombia for the past 23 years, with businesses in transportation, technology, financial services, and telecommunications, being its major clients.

“This new investment by Sitel confirms Colombia’s potential as an investment destination in BPO… It is a vote of confidence in our talent that will bring technology, knowledge, and jobs” said Flavia Santoro, President of ProColombia.

“Colombia is the third country with the most contact center agents in the region with about 124,000 and it is estimated that by 2020 it will exceed 130,000,” stated the agency, citing a study by the research firm Frost & Sullivan.

The post Sitel Bets Big on Colombia, to Add 2,000 New Staff to its Workforce appeared first on Nearshore Americas.

Global BPO provider Sitel has begun building a co-working center in the Colombian city of Barranquilla to train and oversee home-based employees, besides unveiling an ambitious plan to hire 11,000 people in the Andean country over the next few months.

The facility, nicknamed Maxhub, will be the contact center of the future because it is designed to meet the needs of work-from-home model necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The co-working center will also serve as a location for service delivery, but its main focus will be training newly-hired employees and managing those working from home.

“The typical contact center – with rows and rows of cubicles – is a place of the past,” declared the BPO provider in its description of Maxhubs.

The campus will feature 1,500 square feet of co-working space. More than anything else, it will be equipped with a gym, cafeteria, and a library, where both remote-workers and on-site employees will socialize and learn from each other.

The Maxhub will be used to “support our growing network of at-home associates with tools and resources,” says Eduardo Endo, VP of Operations at Sitel Colombia.

Some employees at the facility will work even while learning. If everything goes according to the plan, the facility will be up and running in the Spring of 2021.

Sitel moved most of its 5,000 Colombian employees to home environments following the coronavirus outbreak. All of them are still operating from home. The BPO provider is not talking about bringing them back to the office.

Sitel has been operating in Colombia for the past 23 years, with businesses in transportation, technology, financial services, and telecommunications, being its major clients. Earlier this year, local media houses reported that the call center operator had secured 10 new clients in the Andean country in a space of two months.

Sitel is not the only BPO provider looking to hire thousands of employees in Colombia. Earlier in August, Teleperformance disclosed plans to recruit 10,000 remote customer care agents in the Andean country.

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