English-language capacity. Highly competitive costs. Multi-city delivery. The convenience of nearshore accessibility.

Combined, these features are the hallmark of successful outsourcing. Remarkably, Altia Smart City in Honduras offers these features and more for clients seeking world-class service delivery.

Altia Smart City’s business parks in San Pedro Sula and the capital of Tegucigalpa enable outsourcers to overcome a series of friction points that routinely complicate investments and prevent contact centers from quickly reaching their potential.

For many outsourcers, launching operations in a new locale can be arduous. English-speaking agents often serve as the lifeblood of successful outsourcing operations, driving many firms to undertake intensive and ongoing efforts to recruit, screen, train and retain agents. As a dedicated provider of office space for outsourcers, Altia Smart City has over the past decade forged relationships with language schools and universities for agent recruitment.

Altia Smart City maintains a database—fully accessible by clients—that profiles a large pool of potential agents, each pre-screened based on language abilities, higher education course of study, and other skills. These relationships allow Altia Smart City to leverage Honduras’ bilingual talent in a way to facilitate BPO operations and expansion, while saving outsourcers the hassle of establishing their own recruitment campaigns. 

What’s more, Altia Smart City not only screens and hires agents on behalf of its clients, but it cultivates a sense of community in San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa. The country’s largest university, Unitec, has a campus in Altia Smart City, and the City features lifestyle amenities ranging from a gym to shopping to healthcare facilities and counseling services--all on-site. Such amenities foster agent wellness and loyalty. Predictably, more satisfied agents mean lower attrition and higher quality CX management.

Given the focus on education and sustainable business operations, nothing like it exists elsewhere in the American nearshore, including in such well-known BPO hubs as Colombia.

Another major friction point for outsourcers is finding the right space. Granted, commercial real estate can be readily found throughout Latin America, Europe or Asia. Outsourcers though generally must contend with building or retrofitting offices to enjoy a suitable office space.

That expressly is not the case at Altia Smart City, where every outsourcer instead enjoys turnkey solutions. Altia customizes the physical space, from design and decoration to the exact computers specified by the client. Meanwhile, maintenance and IT teams are at the ready 24/7 to remedy any problem.

A dedicated focus on the BPO and ITO industry allows Altia Smart City to also manage disruptions in client’s businesses, a source of continuity in what has proven a tumultuous period since the outbreak of COVID-19.

“A little over a year ago, we were in a difficult situation all of our industry faced this terrific pandemic,” Miguel Schettini, VP of Operations for Startek Honduras, said recently. “What Altia did for us was just phenomenal. They were supporting us in terms of just getting our business back online with the least time possible, with minimum disruption.”

Finally, foreign investment is often slowed by regulatory demands and bureaucratic steps that prevent the quick launch of operations. However, Altia Smart City enjoys a unique status because it is deemed by the Honduran government as operator of a free trade zone. All its clients thus enjoy exemptions on all federal and local income taxes, as well as sales and customs taxes.

Meanwhile, Altia’s legal team works with clients to determine the correct form of incorporation. Usually, legal incorporation in Honduras takes about three business days. Subsequent steps, ranging from lease signing to free trade zone registration and filing for a customs code for imports and exports, are completed about a month later. All told, clients are operating in Altia Smart City roughly six weeks after expressing their interest. 

From setup to operations, regulatory requirements to recruitment, Altia Smart City offers a one-solution model that enables operators to avoid business headaches. Because Altia Smart City offers solutions for every other aspect of setting up and operating a contact center, customers are free to focus exclusively on their core business.