This was an incredibly productive experience, and you can read the highlights in previous entries 1, 2, 3, 4, & 5. What I hadn't written about was the wonderful visit I made to a call center run by Raya, one of the middle east's largest and most sophisticated outsourcing companies.

Raya's center is in a suburban area of Cairo. Unlike the other main center I visited on my trip, Raya's operation is not confined to a self-contained industrial park. It's in a robust-looking, modern building that is one of many that look to be in a genuine neighborhood. It gives the impression of a certain amount of confidence in the local infrastructure - there's no sense that Raya has felt the need to isolate the center for either business continuity or security reasons. I mean that as a compliment ... the appearance of normality in the business environment in and around the center is a profound and comforting one.

The center serves a pretty wide variety of western companies with a high profile. They count Intel, Microsoft, Cisco, P&G and McDonalds among their BPO clients. Inside the center, every seat was filled with agents talking in a English, Arabic and European languages. In contrast to other centers I've seen both in Egypt and the US, the Raya operation was seemed keen on making the most use of square footage (or square meterage, I suppose). It felt like it was full to bursting, with agent stations around every corner in the vertically oriented building. It resembled the kind of back office center you see in cities like New York, where real estate is expensive and space isn't wasted. At the same time, there were posters and banners up everywhere from the American client companies. I was impressed by the polish and professionalism exhibited by the agent staff and by the managers - it was clear that this wasn't just a one-off; these folks clearly understood how to implement modern call center best practices in operations, as well as in technology infrastructure.

Some of the interesting facts I came away with.... the average wage for a rep in their center was US$4,000 to $6,000. The company has approximately 850 reps filling 800 seats on three floors of their complex. In 2005 their attrition rate was 35%, with an average tenure of 18-24 months. Still, they hire just one out of ten applicants for agent positions, an indication that the labor pool in Egypt has not yet come close to exhaustion. Raya is a large company in Egypt, heavily involved in IT and other technology operations. The call center outsourcing component represents about 10% of the company's overall profits, and is the second most profitable company within the Raya organization. There is a building poking up from the skyline of Cairo displaying the Raya name over the Nile River - an indication of the high level of brand awareness and corporate heft of the company on the local level.

Overall my impressions of this center, as well as the other centers I visited and the industry pros I met while in Cairo gave me a sense that the Egyptian call center industry is at least as worthy of offshore consideration as any other competing locale. The business conditions are encouraging, and the professionalism of the people and companies getting involved in call center activities in Cairo was very high.