By Tom Noda
US-based business process outsourcing (BPO) company Expert Global Solutions (EGS) formally opened on Wednesday, June 11, its eighth site in the Philippines, which also houses the company’s own Global Command Center.
Located at the Eton Centris, an emerging central business district in Quezon City, the new site is dubbed as EGS Centris with 21 floors capable of accommodating 6,000 employees at full capacity. It currently has 4,000 seats for voice and non-voice outsourcing services.
EGS Centris has become the seventh site for EGS in Metro Manila and the eighth site in the whole Philippines.
EGS president and country head in the Philippines Bong Borja led the new site’s unveiling ceremony together with EGS chief operating officer Jack Jones.
Borja stressed that the installation of the company?s Global Command Center inside its new headquarters at EGS Centris is a unique case compared with other BPOs in the Philippines, which have their global command centers based mostly in the US.
To solve the attrition problem in the local outsourcing industry, both Borja and Jones said EGS has created more diverse jobs to provide career development opportunities for Filipinos.
“There’s now a big push not only to retain talent but talent development,” Borja said. “About 1,000 of the 14,000 employees we have are non-voice. We do a lot of shared-services jobs we have over here.”
Jones, who was the former senior vice president of JP Morgan Chase, said EGS is trying to balance voice and non-voice jobs.
“What’s crucial for us is we get more diverse job types and we’re working with our clients on that. I’m more interested in their back office. To help [clients] with data jobs, analytics jobs, and that creates career paths,” Jones said.
Borja said the total attrition rates in the Philippine outsourcing industry is estimated around 60 to 70 percent. He claimed EGS is operating better than industry standards and has significantly lower percentage of attrition rates.
“The more diverse jobs we could create over here, like tech, human resource, finance jobs, this gives people a chance to grow into their field,” Jones said, adding the new facility promotes work-life balance with its own recreation area, fitness gym, and clinic with a company nurse and doctor.
EGS globally now has around 40,000 employees catering to companies in various industries such as communications, education, financial, government, healthcare, insurance, retail, technology, transportation and logistics, travel and hospitality, and utility.
