Cloud-based and on-premises software provider Genesys recently said it sees a great potential in its business operations in the Philippines because the country is a powerhouse not only in the traditional business-process outsourcing (BPO) industry but also in the knowledge process outsourcing.
Tony Bates, chief executive officer of Genesys, told BusinessMirror in a recent e-mail interview that the country is also going to be a leader in the BPO industry’s next wave, the “PPO,” or personalized process of optimization.
“We made the decision to open an entity in the Philippines in 2016 and by the beginning of 2017, we opened our Manila office and hired our first employees under that entity. Since then, the company has been investing significantly into our Philippine operations to the point that today, our Manila office is our second-largest office by head count, and has more than 520 employees across our company’s diverse divisions including customer service, finance, professional services, engineering, IT, sales, marketing, human resources, and more,” Bates said.
“In mid-2017 we started to build our Apac Finance shared services team in Manila. This team has grown to 90-plus employees and is now supporting global finance operations and not just Apac,” Bates added.
With a big number of businesses in the Asia-Pacific region converting to the cloud, Bates said Genesys is planning to double the size of its Manila office. In the next five years, Genesys will invest in its resources and develop their Manila office into a first class, multidiscipline design function center which can house a thousand employees and add more departments, including a research and design function. He said this will enhance Genesys’s ability to deliver game-changing customer service capabilities that leverage the cloud, artificial intelligence, and other emerging technologies to businesses across the country. He said Genesys is going its strategy depending on the hunger for digital transformation of a certain region or country. In the Asia-Pacific region, he pointed out that Genesys’s customers are hungry for cloud solutions and highly personalized interactions supported at scale through AI.
“The market moves in this direction and Genesys is well-positioned to capitalize on the opportunity. We also have a rich partner ecosystem in the country, including technology leaders, such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, and more. We plan to continue to grow our ecosystem with complementary partners that can enhance our footprint in Asia and across the globe,” he said.
He said the objective of Genesys for the Philippines is to support the market in becoming more globally competitive by providing customer experience capabilities that are on a par with global standards. He added the country’s transformation from KPO to PPO, which the company see as the major driving force of the country’s BPO industry, will be a real opportunity not to lose jobs but to increase efficiency.
Bates said the key for organizations in the country to adopt this intelligent technology is to help employees understand its potential to make their jobs more fulfilling by taking the mundane, easily automated tasks off their plates. If successfully implemented, he said AI will help boost the country’s BPO industry, and at the same time allow people to keep jobs and increase their productivity and their companies’ customer satisfaction level.
“As we expand our business footprint in the Philippines, we also plan to continue to grow our partners ecosystem with complementary partners that can enhance further our footprint in the Philippines, in Asia and across the globe,” he said.