Expat Guru

While visiting Nicaragua, I had a chance to spend some time with Connect International, a new call center founded in Managua in February of this year. The call center is primarily focused on outgoing collections activities at the moment, but let me tell you, these guys are comers. They will be one of the dominant call centers in region within the next couple of years, of that I am sure. What I see is a dynamite team of young people, led by a young, intelligent, super motivated CEO, Juan Carlos Montealegre.

Juan is one of the latest generation of Nicaraguans whose families left the country during the war and who migrated to the U.S., now the children of these families, including JC and many of the people who work for him, are returning to Nicaragua and creating a whole new class of professionals.

Nicaragua is going to compete with Honduras as the next “Green Field,” opportunity for Contact Center development.

Both countries have un-mined bilingual human resources with excellent language and cultural skills, great business acumen and tremendous educations. With Costa Rica pretty much all mined out, (With the exception of the carribean side), Companies in the U.S. are looking for alternative sites to establish their contact centers.

Companies like Connect International, and Press 2, are demonstrating that Nicaragua has the capacity to meet that need. One of the things that I appreciate about Connect, is the young, dynamic leadership. The Management Team from JC Montealegre on down are smart people with vision, and that is what it takes to succeed in what has become a commodity marketplace.

I will be keeping my eye on CI. I expect that within the next year or two they will double or tripple in size. It will be interesting to see how that growth affects them as a company.

This entry was posted Sunday, August 26th, 2007 at 10:26 pm and is filed under Business, Call Center. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.