By Kirk Laughlin

The credit card industry’s way of keeping a tight lid on fraud and other slippery activity has been through the creation of “PCI” – the short-code name for a comprehensive set of rules that govern just how credit card handlers should protect card information and the privacy of cardholders.

Contact centers, especially those in Latin America and the Caribbean that deal with payments, billing and collections, are naturally prime candidates to adopt PCI. “It’s become a big topic of late and in some situations it’s becoming ‘table stakes,’”, says industry consultant Ann Harts, of HartsGroup. “There continues to be a large flow of business opportunities for call center/BPO companies who are PCI compliant… some clients are starting to migrate to this designation as a minimum or an industry standard, even though it may not needed based on the type of work.”

For one thing, more and more customers are going to demand it, says Thomas Oronti, president of Nearshore Call Center Services, a Dominican Republic based provider that employs about 1,200 agents in three facilities in the country. Oronti told Nearshore Americas recently that PCI compliance has become a top priority for his organization over the last year. “Bigger companies want to see a PCI certificate,” he says.

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The area around Kingston could become a tech center, if government plans for a business park go forward.

By Kirk Laughlin

One of the bigger bellweather moments in the migration of services’ work from India to the Nearshore came over a year ago when Delta Airlines publicly let it be known that they were investing heavily in call center functions in Jamaica and “pulling out” of South Asia.

The organization benefiting most from this was E-Services Group, which was acquired by global contact center giant ACS for $85 million. Over 4,000 E-Services employees joined ACS, and Delta has remained a key customer throughout the ownership transition.

This move seems to be part of a string of developments that are putting Jamaica – one of the most convenient Nearshore locations for North American companies – higher on the radar for outsourced services. Long seen as a modest sized call center hub, Jamaica is chipping away at reforming its image into one of a fuller-scale outsourcing destination that has the talent and capacity to play at a higher level that would include finance, accounting and technology services.

“We want to move into the next stratosphere,” says Don Gittens, senior consulting officer at trade promotion agency, Jamaica Trade and Invest, who notes that the country is focused on equipping students with a kind of technology literacy that is seeing increasing demand from US corporations.

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“This is a non stop job and we are working with five organizations to make sure all the people are receiving our aid,” said Emma Castro, Site Administrator for Stream.

By Karina Cuevas

A large part of the Dominican Republic call center industry has stepped up in a wide variety of ways to help alleviate the terrible suffering in Haiti.

Many of the institutions began collecting monetary donations internally through their employees, while others have obtained in-kind goods to deliver in Haiti. “Right after the earthquake, a high sense of corporate responsibility kicked in,” said Kemil Carbuccia, Sales and Marketing Manager for Nearshore Call Center Services. We always try to contribute because there is a willingness to help the people in need.”

Nearshore Call Center Services has already made three trips to the devastated nation and is planning on a fourth one within the next two weeks. Employees have delivered medicine, food and clothing to various sectors in Haiti and despite their well intentioned efforts; it does not seem like enough.

“At the beginning it was traffic and logistics [that made it difficult to get to Haiti],” said Carbuccia. Everyone wants to help, but it’s hard to organize and try to get everyone what they need.”

A client company of Nearshore is providing space for storage and thanks to contacts in Haiti; the goods are being delivered from one community to another in a somewhat efficient manner despite the lack of security engulfing the country.

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Former US president Bill Clinton appealed for big business to help Haiti “rise from the ashes” on Thursday as a rising Chinese leader made his biggest international appearance yet at the Davos forum.

While Greece’s prime minister attacked currency speculators, Clinton told the political and business elite at the World Economic Forum that real money could be made in the Caribbean nation where nearly 170,000 people died in the January 12 quake.

“They need to be helped through this hideous natural disaster,” said Clinton, a UN special envoy on Haiti, a country he said had been “punished by either being ignored or abused”.

“They’ve got the best chance they’ve ever had in my lifetime … to escape that past and we have the best chance we’ve ever had to be a part of that,” he said as he launched an initiative at the World Economic Forum to get private sector help for the …

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Press Release, January 14, 2010

Affiliated Computer Services, Inc. today announced it has been placed in the “Leaders” quadrant in industry analyst firm Gartner Inc.’s Magic Quadrant for Finance & Accounting BPO.

ACS was positioned in the leaders quadrant based on the evaluation criteria of ability to execute and completeness of vision. According to the report, “Leaders are performing well today, both with a clear vision of market direction and by actively building competencies to sustain …

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NSAM EXCLUSIVE GUEST POST

By Peter Ryan, Lead Analyst – BPO and Contact Center Outsourcing & Services, OVUM

Since Fidel Castro’s relinquishment of power to his brother, Raul, many Nearshore outsourcing speculators have been wondering aloud whether Cuba could be the next big thing for contact center services into North America.

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NSAM Call Center Insider

It is no secret that call centers in the Caribbean are fast finding customers in North America.  As a Senior Manager of Fulfillment for a US-based business media company, my job was to make sure that I helped serve the telemarketing and audience recruitment needs of my company and our clients.

The decision to begin assessing Caribbean call center operators was simple.  We simply weren’t getting the value we required out of American and Eurasian call centers (cost, competencies and reporting were all being scrutinized) and it was clear to us we needed to make some changes.

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Nina Kawalek, President and CEO of the Resource Center for Customer Service Professionals (RCCSP), has just announced the schedule for training throughout the Caribbean and Latin American (CALA) region.  We talk a lot about investing in human capital in the nearshore BPO industry and there is probably nothing more tangible than investing in your own teams through these top-notch programs.

Click here for more information:

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We continue to get significant interest in our coverage of the ACS acquisition of E-Services, based in Jamaica and St. Lucia. As follow up, I wanted to post a link to the transcript of yesterday’s ACS analyst meeting which included discussion of the E-Services acquisition.

Tom  Burlin,  Chief Operating Officer at ACS, explains on the call:  “The acquisition provides us with potential for incremental BPO crossselling opportunities…We believe this acquisition will be a really nice addition to ACS and helps expand our global production model.” For the full transcript click here.

The deal – which was reportedly years in the making – continues to be a promising indication of ACS belief in the human capital potential in the Caribbean …

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