Salemptas

Eleven years had gone by since we first opened a call center in an offshore setting. We had our ups and downs and are still holding on. There are some changes that we needed to embrace but that is all part of running a business. I could not say that we are doing great but we are definitely doing better despite the recession that hits the US and most other countries.  We have another big account and we are taking measures in ensuring that we will stay in the call center business for a longer period of time. No matter how hard the economy is, we can still make things happen.

When we had our ISO certification, it paid way. One of the biggest telephone company in US have decided to do business with us. Five hundred representatives will be trained for the new account and it was great. We will be handling the customer service and the billing department as well as the sales department. It was a huge project after the computer company we had. The contract price was good and it will be a great help in our company. Business is starting to be better again. Our hopes are high that with  the acquisition of a call center in Florida we will be attracting more big businesses.

The  deactivation of one of our biggest account we have was really a big blow in our company. That means six hundred agents, supervisors, coaches and managers will be out of work. The revenue the computer company has been giving us was almost thirty percent of the total revenue we are generating. But we can not hold on to them since we are selling less and less warranties every quarter. More cost cutting measures were observed. To attract more big fish to do business with us, we have decided to be ISO certified. That means we needed to buy more sophisticated security equipment to make sure that we will be certified. It will be an added cost but it will be a goo investment.

From three thousand six hundred thirty employees, we were now down to one thousand four hundred fifty final count. The monthly birthday celebration was canceled and some of the employee benefits were suspended. We have been hearing some complains but we need to cut down costs to save the business. The biggest blow we had was when the computer company whom we have been doing business with for the past seven years gave us a notice of deactivation. Not many Americans wants to extend the warranties of their computers since most computer companies now offer their new computers at a very low price and instead of renewing the warranties of their computers they will be using the money for more important things like food and health insurance.

After a glorious decade of doing off shore call center business, economic recession finally hit America. Just before the election of the new President of the United States, we experience lesser volume of calls from customers wanting to buy stuff out of their catalogs. Some of the accounts we have are pulling out and deactivating. When an account deactivates, there will be agents with no vertical market so we need to either force to resign them if they have some work issues or lay off some of them. We also resorted in some cost cutting measures. It started from not giving some free meals and bottled water and until we needed to suspend their annual merit  increase.

In a matter of five years, we already have more than three thousand employees. Aside from the supervisors and the agents, we now  have different departments. We now have sales managers, program managers, sales coach, we also have a more systematic payroll and time keeping system. We also garnered distinction awards from local and international award giving bodies. Business was doing fantastic and I was able to bring my family here and settle with a very comfortable lifestyle. A lot of companies abroad are  taking notice of our off shore business and since we have huge account like the computer company and a telephone company, we are very feasible.

After three years of running an off shore call center business, we finally got our very first huge account. It was from a world renown computer manufacturer and we are going to sell warranties for their computers. It was our very first ever outbound project. We have been taking inbound calls for three years now and it was a great challenge for us to finally do the calling instead of taking calls. We will be selling warranties to their customers and the pay we agreed upon was good. If the computer company continues to do business with us we will surely hit the call center industry big.

From a single storey building, we acquired another bigger premise with three existing two storey buildings on it. Our employees of less than fifty became three hundred. We then had three shifts, morning, night and graveyard shifts. From three accounts, we were able to get twenty five accounts. Business was growing and that is because we were able to offer low cost business partnership with other companies abroad. Most of the accounts we have are order entry line from catalog companies. Since our employees speaks good English and they are warm hearted by nature, we always get commendations from customers and less complains.

We leased a small building as a start and we hired about a handful of people to do the phone orders for us. Since we have a lot of contacts amongst different companies that are looking for low cost order entry and customer service representative, we were initially got three companies to do business with us. They were customers service for a phone line, order entry for a clothing company and catalog request line. Since we got very dedicated employees, all the calls that were routed to us were all good calls. In less than a year we were able to expand the operation of the business.

I used to work in a telecommunications company as a customer service representative for almost two years until I was promoted as a supervisor. In less than a year, I was promoted as a program manager. All was doing well until I got an offer from one of my former colleagues about opening an offshore call center business. When I had the chance to discuss it with him, the plan was great and soon I filed my resignation, bid my family good bye and we got a plane and settled in one of the busiest city in that Asian country.