woensdag 16 september 2009 14:38

The Dutch market leader in the area of offshore customer contact, Unamic/HCN, sees an increase of 25% in customer contact activities contracted out to Suriname and Turkey by Dutch companies in 2009. Having customer contacts handled offshore appears to be an attractive way to reduce costs substantially, while still maintaining the quality required by clients. Thus, this trend follows the tendency to outsource to offshore locations that has for years been widely accepted in the domain of ICT services. Countries like Surinam and Turkey are popular as offshore destinations for customer contact activities because of the broad availability of trained people whose mother tongue is Dutch. This growth trend is influenced by the current economic circumstances but also by the generally improved image of the quality of customer service in the low wage countries. The typical customer contact activities carried out in offshore locations are customer service, technical helpdesk and back office processes. In order to anticipate the strong increase of offshore contracts, the workforce of Unamic/HCN in Surinam is currently being expanded from 300 to 400 and the company commissioned the building of a new and bigger contact center in Paramaribo earlier this year.