5 Musts for Emerging Offshore Destinations

There can be no doubt that while the the CX offshore delivery environment is flattening as 2024 winds down, there are still new destinations that are popping up to tempt contact center executives.  Two recent examples include North Macedonia, which has drawn significant interest among European BPOs and their clients, as well as Fiji, a country that has made quite the splash with outsourcing CX influencers over the past few months. However, as history has shown excellence in execution is everything – do it well, and the sky’s the limit; do it poorly, and there is nowhere to go but down.

Thus, in no particular order, the following are 5 essentials that private sector players and government officials in emerging offshore destinations need to consider as they take their value proposition to the global market.

• Go niche or go home – positioning an emerging offshore destination as somewhere that outsourcers can perform any-and-all CX functions is unrealistic and smacks of desperation. The jack-of-all-trades / master-of-none approach is littered with the remains of countries that attempted to appeal to a wide variety of investors only to find it was unsustainable from a skilled labor market perspective.  Rather, the most important thing that an emerging offshore destination’s stakeholders can do is to initially identify a small number of services that can be reasonably delivered from their jurisdiction, and do them exceptionally well, so as to drive a reputation of  functional excellence.
• Quality, not low-cost, wins the game – in 2024 and beyond, no credible emerging offshore destination should promote itself as a cheap option. To be clear, price point will always be a consideration among outsourcers and their clients when it comes to setting up shop in a new market, but the focus around the quality of delivery and positive outcomes (in other words, value) is likely to generate much more commercial stickiness in the long run.  Operators that concentrate too heavily on emphasizing excessively low-cost support are invariably going to alienate quality-driven enterprise partners.
• An independent industry body is non–negotiable – any credible emerging offshore destination cannot be without a representative organization that is able to address its burgeoning CX sector’s concerns with relevant policy makers. With the best will in the world, individual BPO executives will not have the same clout as a collective association that carries the weight of a significant number of players. Ideally such an industry body would be self-funded taking no public money, in order to maintain autonomy, thus avoiding accusations of acting on political grounds. And, if managed properly, an independent association can act as an effective promotion vehicle for the emerging offshore destination with potential clients abroad.
• Partnerships on education and workforce development make sense – once an independent industry body that represents the CX space has been established, working with leaders in education and workforce training will be crucial in making certain that a sustainable labor force to take on CX roles is at the ready. This will mean advising policy-makers around the types of skills needed (such as second languages, technology and cultural awareness), and making the case to have these included in educational curriculum.
• Targeting right demand markets is half the battle – a scattered strategy in which an emerging offshore destination’s stakeholders run around the planet promoting their location to anyone willing to listen is time and resource-consuming. A better way of doing things is to conduct the research required to understand the countries where the emerging offshore destination carries the most favor, and attack those markets vigorously with surgical precision.  Not only will this yield faster results, it will help BPOs in the emerging offshore destinations quickly build up use-cases that can be leveraged for new demand markets in other parts of the globe.