In June I visited Cairo, Egypt for a conference and series of call center site visits.

One of the highlights of my recent trip to Cairo was participating in a panel discussion about the different attitudes toward offshoring in the US and the UK. I represented the US point of view along with Keith Fiveson of ITESA. (Ironic, isn't it, that the American contingent consists of two guys named Keith from New York City?)

In my last post, I mentioned that there are four components to the business case that Egypt is trying to present to the West, four elements that justify the proposition that you can profitably pursue call center operations there. Four, that is, after you talk about infrastructure. But because we assume that infrastructure is a given, it's these four that act as qualifiers or differentiators between competing locales:

• education
• language
• service culture
• and continuous supply of labor

I don't want to spend a lot of time talking about whether Egypt passes muster in any of these areas; that's too particular a judgement based on any company's matrix of important variables. Every site selection or outsourcing decision is unique, and what's good for you may be inadequate for the company across the street. What I want to note here is that Egypt has intelligently identified these four areas as things they can concentrate on and improve in; and that these represent a good baseline for anyone starting to look at an offshore choice.

It's not enough to be able to assert that you have enough warm bodies to fill your quota of call center jobs today; you have to assure clients that the systems you have in place (the schools, the job training academies, the languages your nation speaks) will provide an ongoing class of eager young workers this year and every year. A country/locale that wants to build an industrial park can find 300 English speaking computer literate workers to fill it without too much trouble. A country that wants to build an industry will have to demonstrate that it's in it for the long haul - that it understands that call center work leads to higher attrition than other industrial or service categories. They'll plan ahead, and devote budgets to education that supports the long term mission of populating the centers. And they'll do it knowing that the jobs may not materialize - they have to take a risk on that, because that's the only way a Western company is going to locate there.

Egypt is trying to demonstrate that commitment in a couple of ways. It's a nation of 70 million, and admittedly a poor country with tourism its number one industry. From a call center point of view, tourism works to Egypt's advantage. It encourages multi-linguality, which the nation has anyway through the legacy of colonialism and the geographic proximity to Europe. It also puts service into the forefront of the nation's economic thinking; both tourism and call centers depend on the success of the customer interaction for their profitability.

Another thing they've done is create a Call Center Academy, funded in part by the government and part by the local outsourcing companies. At present, several hundred people a year are being trained specifically for call center work; the idea is to keep a pipeline flowing of people who know what the work is like, are familiar with the environment, have had their language skills tested and honed. And the outsourcers commit to hiring a certain percentage of the graduates of the program as one of the conditions of the incentives.

What's interesting about this is that it puts the competitive differentiators into the realm of things the local industry can control: people, training, education.... Rather than building a call center and hoping customers come, it puts the onus on the local industry to build a culture of call center behaviour based on demonstrable success criteria. Whether it will work for Egypt - or any other locale, for that matter - is anyone's guess. But it's the beginning of a process that can't bear fruit overnight. I think they're headed in the right direction.

In my next post: My panel at the Offshore Conference... What I said, & what I wished I'd said .... What Peter Ryan said that wow-ed the audience.

"It's clear to us from the outside that Egypt has put enormous resources into telecommunication infrastructure, which of course needs to be 100% available." -- Graeme Mair, Oracle, in his presentation at the Offshore Customer Management Conference.

Let's stipulate for a minute that the Friedmanesque world has taken hold and that conditions are (relatively speaking) flat. What does that mean for call centers? And for American companies looking to do business globally? One of the most impressive things about my visit to Egypt was to set foot in actual call centers and see with my own eyes that a) the power stays on, b) the workstations glisten with the cool light of modern, western software, and c) the Internet is widely, deeply, fibrously available. Inside the gates of the call center operations you would never be able to tell - by looking at the infrastructure - that you are not in Phoenix, London or Bangalore. Note that I added India to that sentence there at the last minute. Don't we all take it for granted that the physical underpinnings of call center life - of modern, mechanized and digitized business life in general - are freely available in India? In Manila? In Johannesburg and Dubai? Yeah, we do. Which is my way of acknowledging that the infrastructure is good; it's acceptable; it's not something you need to worry about or even think about beyond the first stage of location assessment. It's flat. You can build a call-center-class industrial park and plop it down just about anywhere on the face of the earth these days. That's what you need to get to the starting line in the race to attact call center business. It's not the finish line.

Egypt has several major call center companies vying for a place in the world outsourcing/offshoring market. During my trip to Cairo, I visited two of them, Xceed and Raya. Both companies had, in recent years, come to America to talk about the work they do and the unique advantages they bring to the marketplace. One of the main reasons I went to Egypt was to see with my own eyes what the situation was on the ground.

Our first visit was to Xceed. A little background: Xceed was founded in 2001; it was (and still is) an offshoot of Telecom Egypt, the national phone company. TE currently owns 98% of the company. From 2001 through the middle of 2003, the bulk of Xceed's revenue came from managing scattered call centers for Telecom Egypt augmented by a bit of IT consulting. As of July, 2003, they moved into their own centralized call center facility and began the process of building up an offshore/outsourced clientele.

I just returned from a weeklong trip to Egypt - a trip centered around the Offshoring Customer Management International Conference held in Cairo. I went as a delegate, a panelist, a curious sightseer eager to visit an exotic locale. But mostly I went as an observational skeptic: why was Egypt the host of a global call center gathering? Was there substance to their bid to become part of the outsourcing/offshoring equation? What did things look like from the perspective of the American call center industry?