Sykes BPO: Slowly losing clients
By Juan Dela Cruz

The Sykes call centers in the Philippines have been one of the most admired employers in the outsourcing industry. With claims of being the pioneer among its peers, Sykes established here in the country in 1997 even before the call center boom in the early part of this decade. Simply put, the name Sykes is highly regarded and is a great asset on the resume of any Agent.

However, the strength of Sykes seems to be waning these past few months and may have finally felt the effects of the U.S. financial crisis of last year. Evidence to this observation is the series of pull-outs of its major accounts that have been with them for a considerable amount of time. End-of-life as they call it for their agents. However, to the usual rank and file, this means being transferred to another account or put on a floating status or worse “end-of-life” for them too.

Cisco, a client partner of Sykes in one of their sites here to whom they provide technical support for VPN,  had terminated their contract a few months ago. In more recent developments, another high-profile client of theirs Alltel also has pulled out effective October 18, 2009. Sykes has been providing customer service and technical support for the US wireless phone company. Unfortunately, word has been going around that it seems Alltel couldn’t re-negotiate its contract with Sykes to more mutually agreeable terms so they decided to pull out. The sad part about it is that many agents were made to believe that Sykes was trying to extend Alltel until April 2010, and so they were shocked to hear the news of the exit in the past few days only.

Lately, rumor has it that they are also in danger of losing their biggest client MCI to whom they have been providing customer service and inbound sales support since 2003. A possible shake-up is also looming due to an anonymous expose circulated through to a mass email address and published online by a disgruntled employee within another Sykes account Qwest. It seems drama has been a norm for Sykes these days. How many more accounts will they lose due to one thing or another?

(Email me tips and news at: 1delacruise@gmail.com)