Seven Colombian companies attended the Customer Contact Week in Las Vegas, the largest international event on the outsourcing services industry (BPO) calendar. It was held between the 13th and 16th of December in Las Vegas (United States). ProColombia, the government agency in charge of Exports, Tourism, Investment and Country Branding, accompanied these seven companies to promote the qualities and characteristics that make these key industrial sectors stand out internationally. In addition, Colombia seeks to position itself in the business process outsourcing industry and in the North American market, being this one of the promotional activities.
This year’s event featured more than 700 participants, with nearly 200 exhibitors from the outsourcing industry. Also, the Customer Contact Week was delighted to include in its programme of events the CCWomen Summit, the Diversity and Inclusion Summit, a Financial Services Initiative, that focuses on training, recruiting and retaining top talent.
Colombia is one of the main economic powerhouses in the region, representing 13.1% of all BPO sales in Latin America, surpassing Argentina, Chile, and Peru. In addition, the contact centre sector in Colombia is expected to maintain an accumulated growth rate of 3.8% between 2021 and 2022, which makes the country’s projected future growth one of the largest in the region.
According to the Offshore Confidence Index of 2021, Colombia ranks first ahead of countries such as India and South Africa and the categories demonstrating the best in class for Colombia is governmental support and strong cohesion in the BPO sector. The country’s infrastructure, scalability of talent, reliability of the public sector, recruitment and staffing, and economic stability are also highly rated in the index.
Prior to 2019, the contact center market in Colombia served mainly the telecommunications and financial services industry, representing more than 50% of operations, with Spain and the United States being the main destinations for call center services exports from Colombia. According to the National Administrative Department of Statistics (DANE) exports of the BPO sector increased by 9.6% in 2019 over the previous year, reaching 1,165 USD million and generated more than 583,000 direct jobs.
Infrastructure and talent
The international conference was attended by the following Colombian companies; Atento, BRM, Complarketing, Cos, Emergia, GSS, and Iterum. These companies specialise in offering call center and back office services, in English, Spanish and Portuguese, which has earned them the trust of large multinationals such as Adobe, Amazon, IBM and Microsoft, among others.
These achievements have been made possible largely due to the country’s combined infrastructure and talent. Colombia has 11 submarine cables in operation, making it the second country in the region with the largest number of internet cables allowing it to offer reliable, stable, and fast data transmission. In addition, according to the Ministry of Information and Technology, Colombia registered 2.8 million broadband connections in 2010. In 2018, that figure reached 32.7 million connections.
According to the IMD World Talent Report in 2019, Colombia had the largest workforce in the region, and came first for growth and training, surpassing countries such as Peru, Mexico and Brazil. A workforce with competitive salaries has facilitated large BPO companies to move their operations to Colombia from other regional markets to serve their internal and external markets, most notably the United States and Spain.
Useful Links
2021 CCW, Customer Contact Week: https://www.customercontactweekdigital.com/events-customercontactweek
ProColombia, outsourcing de servicios BPO: https://investincolombia.com.co/es/sectores/tecnologia-de-la-informacion-e-industrias-creativas/outsourcing-de-servicios-bpo
Atento: https://atento.com/es/atentonomundo/english-atento-in-colombia/
BRM: https://www.brm.com.co/
Complarketing: https://echezgroup.com/es/complarketing/
COS (Colombian Outsourcing Solutions): https://outsourcingcos.com/
Emergia: https://www.emergiacc.com/es
GSS Covisian Group: https://covisian.com/es/
Iterum Connections: https://iterumconnections.com/