The world's top call-centre nation has a people problem

The Philippines with companies like Accenture Plc and American Express among those that have set up shop in the Southeast Asian nation

Since the early 2000s, the Philippines added more than a million jobs as foreign companies outsourced customer support and sales tasks to the Southeast Asian nation.

Now a looming wave of automation is threatening employment at call centres and forcing the industry to retrain workers to meet the demand for higher skilled jobs in areas such as healthcare, banking, finance and insurance.

“The biggest challenge is people,” Jojo Uligan, president of the Contact Center Association of the Philippines or CCAP, said in an interview at his office in Manila on Wednesday. “We lack people with enough technical expertise and experience to service