Outbound Call Center Featured Article

Egypt Gains Contact Center Business

By Brendan B. Read, Senior Contributing Editor

Egypt is quickly becoming a popular locale for contact centers as illustrated by deals for two new sites:

 

*          A new Stream Global Services contact center

 

*          Dedicated seats to Cisco at Egyptian-owned and headquartered teleservices firm Xceed’s contact center

 

The firms cite Egypt’s affordable and available well educated, and technically skilled workforce, multiple language support, its central location to serve the European, Middle East, and African (EMEA) markets, high quality voice/data networks, and political stability. Thanks to such reasons Egypt is ranked top in the EMEA region as an offshoring location and sixth overall in the 2009 A.T. Kearney Global Services Locations index.

Stream is opening a 1,000 seat contact center in Cairo, Egypt’s capital and is partnering with the Egyptian Information Technology Development Agency (ITIDA) to employ and train employees there over the next three years. ITIDA, as part of its initiative to empower, grow and develop Egypt’s information and communications technology industry, will subsidize certain employee training costs for Stream.

 “We are seeing tremendous opportunity to offer a highly skilled, technical workforce to support our growing global client base and we believe that Egypt is fast becoming the next ‘go-to’ location for off-shore services for both our North American and our European global accounts,” says Stream’s Chairman and CEO, R. Scott Murray. “We are thrilled to be working with the ITIDA to ensure that we quickly and effectively ramp up training and support efforts in Cairo for these clients. With Egypt now established, Stream is one of the first BPO providers to have a truly global footprint, where English-language support is provided from a variety of onshore, nearshore and offshore locations in the Americas, Europe and Asia.”

Xceed (News - Alert) will provide customer service and support for Cisco’s customers and is expected to employ up to 300 agents on Cisco’s program in three years. It is already serving Cisco's (News - Alert) customers in EMEA and other markets in seven languages: Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. The ITIDA will support the contact center with voice/data lines for the various countries for three years.

 

“In considering locations, Cisco specifically chose Egypt because it has many unique advantages for a contact center destination,” says Cisco’s senior vice president for Customer Value Chain Management, Angel Mendez. ”Additionally Egypt aligns with Cisco's focus to partner with emerging countries in order to create innovative and inclusive business models enabled by technology.”

 

Xceed was selected due to its innovative, world-class offshore support services and dedication to quality. The firm looks at each client independently to deliver solutions based on the client's existing business models and enhancing them to achieve specific goals with regard to client satisfaction and long-term profitability.

 

“Our decision to collaborate with Xceed and ITIDA was based on a number of principles: the quality of agents, accent neutrality, and the ability to resolve customers’ issues,” explains Cisco's general manager for Egypt, Hani Abdel Aziz. “In addition, the flexibility of both Xceed and ITIDA to adapt to our changing business needs and a cultural fit with Cisco will strengthen our ability to advance our country transformation agenda.”

 

“We are looking forward to a great working partnership with Cisco and are adamant that we will deliver an excellent customer experience,” adds Adel Danish, Xceed chairman and CEO. “We already have ambitious plans to grow and expand this operation throughout the Middle East and North Africa region as customer demand grows.”

Brendan B. Read is TMCnet’s Senior Contributing Editor. To read more of Brendan’s articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Tim Gray