"Call center" in trouble for employees/ Companies eye young Africans and Filipinos

2023-12-19 09:39:00, Ekonomi CNA

"Call center" in trouble for employees/ Companies eye young Africans

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The call center sector continues to be in great difficulty for finding employees, although recently Italian companies that offer service to third parties have extended contracts with international operators, including Apple, Booking or DAZN (international platform for sports matches).

For representatives of call center operators, the main cause of the human resources problem remains the high emigration of young people to European countries. The staffs of employees for the sector according to the companies have shrunk by 30% compared to years. According to them, young people in the age group of 25 to 35 years are the ones who are migrating more.

Faced with this difficulty, the companies are seeing as an alternative solution the replacement of the labor force, with foreign employees with knowledge of English and French, as a contribution to improving the situation, given that the enterprises no longer work massively only with Italian speakers.

Lorenc Goga from "Facile.it" told Monitor that the possibility of hiring employees from the Philippines, or North African countries such as Tunisia and Morocco and West African Ghana and Nigeria, remains an option to be considered.

"If the generation of the 80s and 90s learned the Italian language in an auditory way, this is no longer happening massively with today's young people. But the main problem is not the lack of knowledge of foreign languages, since the vast majority of today's young people are familiar with the studied English language. This is an advantage for the sector, which has expanded contracts and services with many international companies.

The main problem remains the inability to find employees, due to emigration. Currently, call center companies cannot respond with employees to the development of this market. In many cases, we are forced to transfer the service campaigns that could be carried out in the country to Italy for implementation, since we cannot find employees. An alternative remains to study the option of hiring foreign employees", he said.

Although so far no contract has been finalized for the recruitment of call center employees from the Philippines and African countries, Goga emphasizes that before the implementation of this measure it is quite necessary to be supported by the Albanian institutions with the drafting of legislation, for the formalization of relations with foreign employees and for their qualification, in order to exclude possible risks for its non-functioning.

Regarding the other alternative for solving the employment problem using artificial intelligence, Lorenc Goga claims that all companies have advanced with investments in automation, helping them reduce costs, but the role of man in this sector remains irreplaceable.

Even other companies in the call center sector have raised the concern earlier that the recruitment problem started in 2017 and has turned into a real concern in recent years.

Smaller call center companies have more reduction in employees. The big ones, after the drop in the number of employees in the pandemic, have started recovery with recruitments.

The administrator of the company "Albacontact" Ervin Gogo claimed earlier for Monitor that in the short term the problem seems unsolvable for the sector, risking the shrinking to the closing of small companies.

According to DPT data, by September 2022, 12,404 employees were employed in call center companies. Compared to 2019, the number of employees has decreased by 8%./Monitor