Doreen Hemlock, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
CENTRAL AMERICA is gaining ground as a hub for call centres and offices that handle data entry and other routine business functions for corporations.
A new report finds nearly 21,000 people employed in call centres in Central America, plus 17,000 working more in back-office and information-technology processing.
Panama leads in the Central America region, followed by Costa Rica, El Salvador and Guatemala, according to the report from Miami-based researcher Zagada Markets Inc.
Avaya is the biggest provider of equipment for the centres, followed by Nortel, Siemens and Genesys, Zagada said.
Central America's growth comes as corporations increasingly delegate their calls and more routine parts of their office work to specialised centres to cut costs and focus on other productive activities.
Many call centre and IT processing firms are setting up "near-shore" in the Caribbean and Latin America for easier monitoring from the Americas, compared to centres in such distant locales as India or the Philippines.
Zagada predicts the number of call centre agents in Central America will rise by about 8,000 in the next 12 months to about 29,000 in early 2007.
