Last month, I witnessed the end of an organization that had helped the Philippines become the contact center capital of the world over the last couple of decades. It was an organization that stewarded the nation in understanding its innate differentiators and applying them to create an industry out of nothing—an industry that, on last count, contributes over 8% to the Philippines’ GDP and employs nearly two million people.
All good things must come to an end. I am afraid that the Contact Center Association of the Philippines (CCAP), too, has reached its end.
Don’t worry. The association has not been disbanded! In fact, its new avatar is probably even more critical to the industry, facing an existential crisis for the first time as its center of gravity shifts from contact handling to experience orchestration, from labor arbitrage to intelligence at scale, and from seat-based delivery to outcome-led CX transformation.
Put your hands together for the newly announced Customer Experience Association of the Philippines (CXAP), a transition that reflects more than just a rebranding exercise; it marks a whole shift in mindset required to guide the industry into the next era.
As I noted in my talk at the Contact Islands Philippines event in Cebu in May, three key drivers are pushing toward a reimagination of customer experience (CX):
For the Philippines, this is both a challenge and a growth opportunity. The country’s legacy strength in voice-led services will remain valuable, but it will no longer be sufficient. Future growth will come from three vectors: new client regions, industry-specific services, and complementary services that sit adjacent to core CX.
CX operators in the Philippines will have to focus on chasing newer revenue sources. This will require significant investments in reskilling and technology, as they will go head-to-head with operators from several newer geographies poised to grow their CX operations.
The most attractive expansion opportunities are already visible. Providers can move into autonomous contact resolution operations, bundled CX and technology consulting, real-time multilingual CX delivery, proactive and predictive support, AI model monitoring, responsible AI governance, platform integrity, reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) operations, and multimodal generative AI data services. Several of these represent global opportunities worth over $1B.
Industry demand will also grow due to inherent factors that drive outsourcing. For example, in the healthcare industry, aging populations across the western hemisphere and margin pressure on payors and providers are driving more outsourcing demand for prior authorization, care navigation, patient engagement, and AI-assisted patient operations. Similarly, there are opportunities in other industries that Philippine operators should identify and focus on. In Avasant’s assessment, healthcare, BFSI, retail, big tech (digital platforms), and telecom form the most immediate opportunities.
Similarly, some countries are facing distinct local factors that are creating new outsourcing opportunities. Japan, with its need for elder care-specific outsourcing services, provides the most immediate opportunity for Philippine operators. The other regions to be considered include the Gulf Cooperation Council, ASEAN, South Korea, and the Nordics.
CCAP’s transformation into CXAP signals to all providers that the need to evolve is upon them. They will have to return to the era when they had to hunt for new sources of revenue and be willing to take bets, make investments, and be pioneers once again.
As they do so, three tenets are worth keeping in mind:
CCAP’s evolution into CXAP is, therefore, not the end of the Contact Islands Philippines story; it is the beginning of its next chapter.
By Swapnil Bhatnagar, Partner, Aditya Jain, Associate Research Director, and Neha Jain, Senior Research Analyst
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