Egypt Has Quietly Grown Into One Of The Leading Global BPO Hubs

?If you look at the Ryan Strategic Advisory research on the most favoured locations for offshoring customer service processes then there are many of the countries you might expect to see… India, the Philippines, and Mexico. However, there is one that may be less familiar - Egypt.

Of course, everyone knows of Egypt. The pyramids at Giza are one of the most famous ancient architectural wonders in the world. But what about doing business in Egypt - in particular customer service processes?

In fact, Egypt has been quietly building a solid Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry since the early 2000s. Egypt is not just one of the most attractive locations in North Africa for BPO, it is rapidly becoming one of the most attractive locations globally. This is largely because of the availability of local talent - highly educated and smart people with experience of customer service processes. It’s also a great location for planning a multilingual hub, almost certainly being the strongest location globally for multilingual agents.

The Oxford Business Group has published extensive data and insight into Egypt. Their view is that there are several reasons why Egypt has become so attractive for BPO and customer service processes.

???????Workforce: The BPO workforce at 169,000 in 2017 grew to 212,000 in 2019. This strong growth has continued post-pandemic (now about 240,000) and now the only African location with more BPO specialists than Egypt is South Africa.

???????Growth and infrastructure: Egyptian BPO is now often operating in over 20 languages and exporting services to over 100 countries - the delivery infrastructure is in place to serve the entire world.

???????Technology: A 5G rollout is already underway and Egypt has a strong depth of talent in IT services such as cloud computing, data analytics, and Artificial Intelligence - all become essential tools for modern BPO.

Egypt presently has over 70 universities and 100 higher education institutes, together graduating more than 537,000 students every year, the majority of which graduate in business administration and law. Among these students, more than 330,000 are eligible for BPO jobs every year, according to Egypt’s national statistics agency, CAPMAS.

A multilingual BPO service is one of the key strengths available from Egypt. Some BPO operations already based in Egypt are offering between 20-30 languages - there are very few places globally where this would be possible. On his own podcast CX Files, analyst Peter Ryan called Egypt the best place in the entire world to create a multilingual hub because of the ease of building out a service using multiple languages.

Industry growth and maturity is taking place in Egypt. Egypt is not just a BPO hub for EMEA or North Africa, it is becoming attractive to companies globally. However, within the EMEA region it is particularly attractive. A London to Cairo flight is about 4 hours and 50 minutes, making this a far more attractive nearshore location than the long haul to Asia. The fact that there is just a single hour of time difference from Europe just adds to the attractiveness.

Egypt is already growing rapidly, but I’d like to see the region move faster because this is such an exciting opportunity for companies in the EMEA region.

Let me know what you think about Egypt and CX by leaving a comment here or get in touch directly via my LinkedIn. Feel free to ask any questions. You can follow the Alorica page on LinkedIn here or visit our website here.

CC Photo by Simon Berger