Costa Rica Call Center Blog

Corporations that require bringing foreign executives and technicians to work in Costa Rica will be able to make immigration procedures quickly through the Internet.

Through a pilot program of the Ministry for Competitiveness and the Costa Rica Immigration Office, intends that applications for residence permit for these workers to be processed in 10 days.

The Pilot Project will start on Tuesday with participation of four companies: Intel, T Menos Costa Rica, Ericsson and Surf Factory.

The initiative unveiled yesterday Jorge Woodbridge, Minister of Competitiveness, and Mario Zamora, director of the Immigration Office.

To make the online transactions interested companies need to register and subsequently include the data and documents of workers who they want come to reside here.  Once immigration officials to analyze the roles and approve the residency cards will be sent by courier to the respective companies.

Although the pilot starts with four companies, and there are 58 companies registered to use the system, said Zamora.

The head of Immigration said the unit daily receives about five requests for multinationals to bring in workers from other countries.

Alejandro Rodriguez, a lawyer representing T Menos (banking software company), Ericsson and Surf Factory, said the digital system will allow companies to save time and money on immigration proceedings.

Woodbridge said this is an additional step by the government to “eliminate unnecessary an bureaucratic procedures”.

“For businesses, time is money and this step will improve Costa Rica’s competitiveness,” he added

Source: La Nacion

George Ahn

CEO

TRIRIGA

Home Depot battled negative headlines in May when shareholders voted down a resolution to enforce more rigid and transparent energy efficiency measures. The resolution proposed that the organization assess company-wide energy use from its buildings, transportation and supply chain. It also urged Home Depot to set energy use reduction targets and report findings and progress to shareholders.

While the measure did not pass, it received support from the $20 billion Connecticut Retirement Plans and Trust, the advisory firm RiskMetrics Group (RMG), and other investors in the $7 trillion Investor Network on Climate Risk (INCR). Despite the outcome, the resolution foreshadows a future in which shareholders increasingly require reports on energy efficiency improvements and climate change risk. Organizations that fail to put the right systems in place today to meet these reporting requirements will suffer.

Findings from CERES, a coalition of investors, environmentalists and public interest groups, report that “the resolution filed with Home Depot is one of a record 67 global warming resolutions filed with 58 U.S. companies and two Canadian companies as part of the 2009 proxy season.” The findings confirm that companies must start to disclose risks from climate change now and provide stakeholder groups with a plan to mitigate those risks.

Further, despite the evidence that climate change disclosure will quickly transition from a proposal to an imperative, many companies have not started to track or abate their carbon emissions.

In fact, according to a 2009 report co-authored by CERES, over 76 percent of the S&P 500 fail to even mention climate change in SEC filings. This is surprising given that, according to a September 2008 McKinsey survey of 1,453 international executives, 50 percent said that environmental issues ranked among the top three areas that would most affect shareholder value in the next five years. While organizations appreciate investors’ concerns, they often lack the tools necessary to address them.

Further evidence that organizations will face more stringent demands from shareholders comes from INCR, an alliance of over 80 institutional investors and financial firms that collectively manage more than $7 trillion in assets. INCR has suggested that congress mandate climate change disclosure in SEC filings, and INCR Director and CERES President Mindy Lubber states, “climate change is a bottom line issue and investors have a right to know which companies are best positioned for the emerging clean energy global economy.”

To meet shareholder climate risk reporting requirements, organizations need technology that not only measures their current carbon footprint, but also manages abatement opportunities, facilitates emissions reduction initiatives and tracks progress and ROI. To gain a sense of where and how to start reporting, consider real estate. Buildings represent 48 percent of energy consumption and present the most significant opportunities to reduce environmental impact, improve operating costs, and demonstrate carbon reduction accountability.

With a technology framework that can identify underperforming building locations, provide a set of analysis tools to evaluate different carbon reduction options, and manage those options through to completion, organizations can address even the most exacting shareholder resolutions.

Investors will use a number of tools to determine how well companies address risks from climate change, including the Global Framework for Climate Change Disclosure, the Carbon Disclosure Project, CERES, and SEC Filings. Companies should seek out technology solutions that provide flexible reporting platforms to facilitate carbon reporting to multiple agencies. All else being equal, companies that adequately disclose and address risks from climate change will be rewarded with higher valuations and a lower cost of capital.

As your organization evaluates shareholder demands, ask yourself this: do you have the right tools to disclose your impact on the environment, or will you, like Home Depot, face climate nondisclosure backlash and risk losing shareholder support?

George Ahn is President and Chief Executive Officer of TRIRIGA. He has more than 18 years of software industry leadership.

Source: Environmental Leader

Aug 24 (Reuters) – Wells Fargo Securities raised U.S. offshore Information Technology and business process outsourcing sector to “market weight” from “underweight,” and said the market displays signs of bottoming, although an upturn is not yet visible.

The second-quarter results reflected signs of market stabilization, especially in the critical financial services and North American markets, analyst Jennifer Fritzsche wrote in a note to clients.

Prominent offshore IT services firms including Infosys Technologies Ltd (INFY.BO: Quote, Profile, Research), Wipro Ltd (WIPR.BO: Quote, Profile, Research) and Cognizant Technology Solutions (CTSH.O: Quote, Profile, Research) have beaten quarterly profit estimates in their latest earnings.

The worst of price pressure is behind and there are improving opportunities in non-traditional markets such as India-to-India and into Japan, Fritzsche said.

“Balance sheets continued to strengthen with all the leaders having significant net cash positions… and provide “dry powder” for any M&A driven offering expansion,” the analyst wrote.

(Reporting by Bijoy Koyitty in Bangalore; Editing by Unnikrishnan Nair)

Source: Reuters

Houston Airport System Development Corporation (HASDC), the fourth largest airport system in the US and recently appointed to be the administrator of the San Jose airport for the next 25 years, is on negotiations with a regional airline to make the San Jose airport into a major hub.

The airport construction is 4 weeks ahead of schedule and is rolling out a new information system that will enable the Government to know on real time, the number of passengers passing

The information was confirmed Jeffrey Scheferman, president of HASDC and his partner, José Renato de Camargo, from the Brazilian company Andrade Gutierrez Grants (AGC).

According Scheferman, the San Jose airport will also serve to facilitate connections from Costa Rica to other destinations.

On the continent Panama is a hub for COPA Airlines, El Salvador is a hub for TACA and Houston, Texas is the hub for Continental.

In two weeks the airport will be connected to the Civil Aviation Technical Council, allowing government entities to have information in “real time” of passengers entering and leaving the country.  Scheferman said that in this way, the government would know every day how much people spend.

This will help HASDC to identify opportunities to open new direct routes from US or elsewhere, said Camargo.

Now, the airport serves 2 million passengers a year, but the consortium aims to attract more direct routes and hub.

Source: La Nacion

In the first year of a combined Caribbean and Central American Countries of the Future ­competition, Puerto Rico marginally grasped first place as the top three countries, including Costa Rica (ranked second) and the Dominican Republic (ranked third).

Puerto Rico achieved not only the top ranking overall, but also the top ranking in the category of business friendliness. The country has the largest number of companies involved in high-tech manufacturing, high-tech services, and knowledge-based sectors in comparison with the rest of the Caribbean and Central American region.

Costa Rica performed consistently well across most categories, ranking in the top five in the areas of economic potential, quality of life, business friendliness, human resources and FDI strategy.

Dominican Republic was perceived to have the best FDI strategy. The Dominican Republic Export and Investment Centre, lists the country’s free-trade zones as a key incentive to foreign investors. Costa Rica and Panama were ranked second and third, respectively, in the category of best FDI strategy.

Source: FDI Magazine

• Company will provide service to Telecom companies in the U.S.
• Will hire 400 people to begin operation in the first quarter of next year

The company originally from Denver, Colorado, plans to receive calls for technical support and sales, activation of new telephone services and queries in accounts payable.

“We are looking for experienced staff in customer care, but also have positions for people who have little or no experience,” said Mary Beth Loesch, Corporate Vice President of the company.

Expansion. The call center in Costa Rica will be the second Star Tek has outside of the US and Canada where it has 19 offices in different cities.

In January, the company began its expansion in Manila, Philippines, with a center where 1,000 people work.

Loesch said Costa Rica was picked to continue to grow because they found the required human resources and English skills in addition to a good business climate.

Vanessa Gibson, director at Cinde, said that the arrival of the company reassures the leading position of Costa Rica in the Contact Center industry.

Source: La Nacion & Denver Business Journal

1. MECE – SLAs should be Mutually Exclusive and Completely Exhaustive (MECE). By this, no two SLAs should measure the same thing, and there should be a SLA for every important aspect of the program. Too often we see SLAs that overlap, creating double jeopardy situations and misleading positive or negative performance reports. In addition, we often see important areas that are left unmeasured due to oversight.
2. Defined – Service levels must be thoroughly defined. For example, abandonment rate within a call center ought to be defined so that parties know whether blocked calls (trunk blockage), calls that terminate in the IVR, calls that terminate in the first 5 seconds (we don’t agree with this, but someone people do), or calls that answered by agents but are the “wrong number” are considered abandoned calls. Check this Q&A section out if you need some idea of how varied definitions are. If you don’t define the service level, you don’t know what you’re measuring.
3. Calculated – Even though you spend time defining service levels, you need to define any calculations. For example, if the service level is abandonment rate, the calculation should defined as “the number of Abandoned Calls divided by the total number of Offered Calls”. Where we use capitalized terms, these are predefined earlier in the SLA section. Vendors and vendor managers should never, ever be surprised by calculations. Give examples in your written SLAs.
4. Measurable – Don’t waste anyone’s time with SLAs that can’t be measured. For example, if you’re measuring customer satisfaction in a call center environment (typically done via a 3rd party after the primary call is concluded), but you don’t have the means to measure customer satisfaction (e.g., your call center doesn’t have the ability to use 3rd parties or your agents aren’t trained to collect satisfaction data), its a waste of time. Typically, angry customers will whip out unmeasurable SLAs and argue that vendors failed to achieve them, which is a huge waste of effort.
5. Easily Measurable – It’s one thing to measure something, its another thing to spend oodles of dollars to measure the same thing. If the cost of measurement doesn’t warrant the benefits of the SLA, don’t use it. The best example of this was a measure where customers call to complain about a bad transaction they’ve recently received in the mail. The vendor didn’t manage the call center, just the backoffice transactions. So, the call center needed to take notes on bad transactions and track them in a manner that allowed auditors to identify if the vendor was the cause of the bad transaction or not. Since the vendor only handled one of six steps in the backoffice process and the mainframe systems didn’t track transaction history, it was impossible to determine who caused the error without significant system modifications.
6. Time Frames – SLAs should cover a specific time period. Daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually, etc. They should also only be assessed once. The example provided in #4 is a bad example of this, since customers could call to complain months after the transaction was completed, making it difficult to understand when to assess a month’s quality number. Essentially, the vendor would be in jeopardy forever, since a customer could complain at any time about a month – and every complaint would only lower the quality score, until the vendor had to pay penalties.
7. Singled Barrels – A SLA should contain only one measure, not two, three, or even four measures. If you’re SLA is “99% of transactions must meet quality standards and achieve customer satisfaction requirements” you need to track both conditions, which is nightmarishly difficult. In questionaire terminology, these are called double-barreled situations, and typically provide misleading or inaccurate pictures of operational performance.
8. Serve a Purpose - In some contracts, a minimum number of SLAs are required (to reduce the vendor’s risk, of course). That’s great when you need 3 or 4 SLAs, but what if you only need two SLAs and are therefore required to make-up another one or two to meet the contractual guidelines? These typically become “gimmes” and are a waste of time. Every SLA should serve a purpose.
9. Actionable – Every SLA should be capable of being influenced through actions of the vendor or the company. If the SLA can’t be influenced, don’t bother. A bad example may be measures of employee satisfaction with compensation in a HR outsourcing relationship, where the vendor has no control over compensation or employee /supervisor communication/training program. Since all employees will naturally dislike their compensation to some degree, the vendor has very little ability to create positive results.
10. Realistic – Look, we all want to be perfect, but those who belong to the cult of zero defects don’t understand contracting and real-life BPO and ITO. Achieving 100% of anything is simply unrealistic in most situations. Your goals can be aggressive (or evenly progressively more aggressive over time), but they should achievable.

Source: 360 Vendor Management

The Central Bank (Costa Rican Reserve Bank) increased the sale of dollars to keep the exchange rate within the maximum price for the currency or “roof of the exchange rate band.”
The entity had spoken very little between June and early July 17. In those seven weeks just sold $ 9.8 million to defend the maximum price for the currency. The week before last week, the bank sold $33 million in reserves and last week it sold $37 million.
On the wholesale market in dollars (Monex), the Central Bank offers to sell the dollars required to keep the maximum rate of the exchange rate band (the roof) and they buy the dollars required to keep the minimum price for the exchange rate (the floor). In this way, the entity seeks the price of the dollar remains within the band. The roof of the band is devalued ¢0.20 per day. Yesterday stood at ¢ 590.05. The floor is fixed at ¢500.
The Central Bank President Francisco de Paula Gutiérrez, said on Wednesday when presenting the revision of the “Macro economic plan” in the second half of the year there are usually a greater demand for dollars and therefore is expected to sell more dollars.
Despite the increased sales dollars, the Government Agency plans to end the year with an increase of $150 million in foreign exchange reserves

Source: La Nacion

• Services are provided in French, German, Mandarin, Russian, Italian and Portuguese
• Twelve percent of work is done in languages other than English and Spanish
• Among the services provider are financial services, tech support and customer service

Although English is the primary language with which multinationals operate, the need to provide services in other languages takes strength from such companies.

Increasingly multinational hire staff who speak French, German, Portuguese, Mandarin, Italian and even Russian.

These languages are required to handle calls for customer service, technical support, or financial and administrative tasks for businesses in Brazil, Europe and Asia.

During the Bilingual Job Fair, organized by Cinde at the beginning of the year, six of the 30 participating services firms sought employees with a third language.

Currently, for every 100 transactions conducted by the companies, 12 are made in languages other than English and Spanish.

“Market demand made companies in the country start its services in English, but there are interesting opportunities in other languages” said Gabriela Llobet, director Cinde, is responsible for attracting foreign investment.

Llobet added that in recent months has noticed the interest of corporations to provide services to companies in Brazil from the country.

Western Union, IBM, Emerson and the Shared Services unit of British American Tobacco, consulted by La Nacion, said they did not have trouble finding staff that speaks languages other than Spanish and English.

Good result. The expansion of staff in other languages is a natural happens in most companies after they have established a successful operations in English and want to expand either provide service on their captive operations or outsourcing.

An example is Western Union (money transfers), which arrived to Costa Rica in 1998 and only gave call center services in English and Spanish, but in 2004 brought new business to date and expanded to eight languages.

“Every year, the company makes three rounds of hiring’s with 20 to 30 people fluent in French, German, Portuguese, Mandarin, Italian and Russian, on each round” said Christian Rodriguez, vice president of Operations.

Of the 1110 employees of the company, 250 (23%) serve the process of fraud prevention and support for agents in Europe, Middle East and Africa. They also do finance and accounting.

Confidence. Multinationals such as IBM (services in human resources outsourcing) opted to do since arriving here from their business in English, Spanish, Portuguese and French.

“IBM is a globally integrated company, and therefore, we work with clients from different geographies,” noted Andrea Melendez, manager of Human Resources at the company. At IBM 80 out of 800 workers speak Portuguese and French.

Emerson Process Management also decided to give its engineering services in automation processes in English and Portuguese, following its opening in 2008.

Melissa Bonilla, manager of Human Resources Emerson, said it made “to provide added value to customers. About 10% of our staff speak Portuguese and 30% are in classes”.

Concentrix arrived in Costa Rica to take advantage of the multilingual labor pool. From its center in San Jose provides technical support in Spanish and French and plans to expand to German, Italian, Portuguese and Russian in the near future. “Costa Rica has built over many years a strong capacity to train people in different languages. The country hosts 9 French language schools, 6 in German, 5 in Portuguese, 7 in Italian. In addition to that about 10% of the workforce in those languages are nationals of those countries that reside in Costa Rica”, stated Manfred Kissling, country manager at Concentrix.

Source: La Nacion

Zagada Institute comprehensive and independent analysis on the region’s seven markets indicates:

• Central America domestic and internationally focused agents positions has doubled from 21,000 in 2006 to to 42,000 in 2008, to exceed 80,000 by 2010
• Centers have grown from 164 to 274 between 2006 to 2008
• Costa Rica has now bypassed Panama to become the number one segment from a jobs and total end-to-end service perspective.
• Guatemala has become the number one growth market showing a 450% improvement over the last 24 months
• Over 600,000 students are now attending the regions 206 universities and institutions with over 125,000 graduating each year.
• Avaya dominates the region and with the purchase of Nortel’s Enterprise unit has positioned itself into monopoly-like status

An estimated 96% of existing agents and BPO workers are bilingual and continue to be a critical high-end niche in providing the customer care and back office needs of U.S. companies. The ever-expanding U.S. Hispanic American market is on track to exceed 50 million with over US$1 trillion in spending power by 2012 and U.S. customers are reporting relatively high levels of satisfaction. These twin factors are pushing demand for the region.

“Despite the Nearshore perception of unrest due to the political challenges in Honduras, at its core the region is pushing all the right buttons with respective states deepening their bilingual output, a healthy mix of local and international vendor firms are growing profits by serving clients well, and demand is expanding from U.S. buy-side companies,” said Philip Peters, CEO of Zagada Markets.

The Central America Nearshore market, however, also faces strategic challenges as the market expands. These include the need to further vigorously expand its bilingual-ready population to meet timely U.S. corporate buy-side demand, the importance of expanding physical contact center and BPO office capacity, and the need to strengthening its middle management core as the region’s vendors grow their service delivery complexity.

Source: Zagada Institute