Telecoms and Software News

Telecoms and Software News

Peter Ryan

Reinforcing Egypt as a leading CRM outsourcing destination
The decision of Stream Global Services to expand its offshore footprint into Egypt validates Ovum's longstanding view that this country has a significant role to play in the delivery of customer-facing services to Western end users. However, to attract critical mass similar to that of India and the Philippines, Egypt's BPO leaders must emphasize its value to the North American market, which has proven a tough nut to crack.
Egypt remains competitive in price and labor skills
There is no question that Egypt has proven its mettle as a location of choice for offshore contact center outsourcers, most recently Stream Global Services. Its labor pool scalability, language skills, and government support for the sector have been crucial to this development. However, it is important to continue promoting Egypt as a delivery center for North America. To date, Egypt has mainly focused on Western Europe.

Stream Global Services' decision to move into Egypt for contact center delivery highlights the significant value that this market has to offer. We have touted the potential benefits of Egypt in a delivery strategy for some time, and believe the country's fundamentals still serve it well. With a population in excess of 80 million (including a large number of university graduates), Egypt's labor pool cannot be ignored in an era in which quality offshore labor is hard to find. Complementing this are the excellent language skills that can be found in Egypt, most notably in Cairo. These advantages have enabled a large number of firms to house pan-European delivery sites in this geography, with agents handling volumes of calls in English, French, Italian, Spanish, and German.