Out of nowhere, Costa Rica is described as “another Puerto Rico”

By Narayan Ammachchi

Rising wages and inflation are threatening to undermine Costa Rica’s outsourcing sector, with several outsourcing firms scaling down operation and fleeing to cheaper locations. Costa Rica has the highest rate of inflation in all of Central America and the country’s currency Colon too has continued to rise against the US dollar. Inflation in February was 6.52 percent, the highest since 2009 and beyond the central bank’s target of 5 percent, according to Bloomberg.

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By Narayan Ammachchi

HP is gearing up to relocate a part of its global services center in Costa Rica to the Indian city of Bangalore, leaving 400 people jobless. The U.S. tech giant has not explained what caused its decision, but analysts believe rising wages and dwindling English-speaking workforce in the Central American country has long been a concern for the Silicon Valley company.

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Commentary: Haiti – for many Americans – has sadly fallen off the ‘radar’ once again. The country remains in miserable shape, and it doesn’t take a Ph.D to recognize that there is no medicine to cure the deep suffering experienced by huge swaths of Haitian society or enough funding and leadership to fix all the systemic flaws in governance and rule of law. Yet, for those of us who have built our lives and careers around the thriving Nearshore outsourcing industry, we do possess important value to the people of this uniquely needy country.

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BY STAFF REPORT

United States’ BPO firm KM2 Solutions has been voted the Caribbean’s best ‘Contact Center of the Year’.

The award, commissioned by Caribbean Business Awards (CBA), recognizes the US company’s strategic vision and execution of the call center service in the Caribbean region.

David Kreiss, founder and CEO of KM2, said he would credit the award to his staff in the Caribbean. CBA’s Janice Sutherland said KM2 had won the award beating out several other contestants, but she did not name the other contested companies.

Tony Jennings, KM2’s Caribbean Regional VP, praised his employees, saying ‘strategic vision and execution amount to little if an organization does not have the right people to execute that vision.’

KM2 has three contact centers in the Caribbean: the largest center in St. Lucia, a center in Bridgetown, Barbados, and a third in Grenville, Grenada.

The company also has a presence in Latin America with another large …

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By Carolina Lopez

Costa Rica has arguably the strongest brand image of any country in Latin America when it comes to looking for a place to do business for U.S. businesses and investors. Since things are working out so well for this nation of 4.5 million people, why then focus on changing the image and tackling a full-on re-branding campaign?

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BY STAFF REPORT

Convergys Corporation is seeking to hire as many as 500 people in San Jose, Costa Rica, where the global BPO provider has opened its fourth contact center.

The new facility is located on Boulevard de Rohrmoser in San Jose.

Convergys already has more than 2000 employees working at its contact centers in Heredia and San Jose, making it among the largest global services employers in the country. (Other well known foreign companies in the services space include HP, IBM and Infosys, which last month revealed its plans for Costa Rica.)

President Laura Chinchilla, who was present at the launch event, expressed support for Convergys’ expanding footprint in the country. Costa Rica’s trade promoter CINDE has stated that Convergys had now become one of the ten leading employers in the service sector.

“With the expansion, the company reaffirms the vote of confidence it has placed in our country and …

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BY STAFF REPORT

Cash-strapped Spanish telecom giant Telefonica has sold its Atento call center business to the US private equity firm Bain Capital for $1.3 billion. Atento is easily one of the most recognized names is Spanish-language call center operations in the Americas region. (One of our reports a few years ago focused on Atento’s operations in Venenzuela.)

Despite the sale, Atento will continue to provide services to Telefonica for nine more years to come. Bain, co-founded by US presidential candidate Mitt Romney, already owns Japan’s biggest call centre operator, Bellsystems24.

According to the Irish Times, several Spanish, Mexican and Brazilian banks have backed Bain’s acquisition of the Telefonica’s call center.

“Bain, which has recently invested in Genpact, the world’s largest business processing outsourcer, is interested in Atento’s strong presence in Latin America, and will look to expand its client base,” said the Irish paper. Atento employs tens of …

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By Jon Tonti

Amassing data for site selection purposes can be challenging, at best. Firms get paid big dollars to curate and make sense of information they pull together from IPAs, research firms, global governance organizations, and proprietary research efforts.  Any honest site selector will tell you that the data is always incomplete, but nevertheless it serves to keep a pulse on different nearshore destinations and to narrow candidate destinations for site visits.  Our friends at Arledge Partners shared with us a bunch of data they have a collected on nearshore markets and we explore it in this Central America “data mashup.”

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By James Bargent

From Baltimore ad-man to Belize BPO evangelist via a Caribbean cruise, the path walked by Scott Newman on his way to becoming an outsourcing trailblazer was definitely off the beaten track. Newman is the CEO of Transparent BPO, a three-year-old operation born out of frustration with outsourcing service providers and the belief that cutting costs does not have to mean sacrificing quality and control. Since its formation, Transparent

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By Rosanne D’Ausilio

A typical customer will not call back a call center.  Not only does this keep costs high, but it decreases customer loyalty and increases turnover.

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