TeleTech expects to employ 1k agents

Inbound customer management call center, TeleTech has officially opened its 700-seat facility in Cebu and projected to employ about 1,000 call center agents in the next eight months.

In a press conference, TeleTech vice president and general manager for the Philippines Maulik Parekh said that the good relationship between the government and the private sector and the good quality of workforce in Cebu has encouraged the company to set up its 8th call center outlet in the Philippines here.

Initially, the Cebu operations will provide customer management service to the company's big clients in the United States, which are big airline firms, retail chain, telecommunications and electronic companies.

"A couple of clients are on the pipeline to be served by the Cebu operation," Parekh said.

TeleTech entered the Philippines in 2002. It has four facilities in Manila, one in Lipa City, Dumaguete and Bacolod, with a total of 8,500 employees.

According to Parekh, the company may open another facility in Cebu, as soon as the 700-seat will be fully occupied.

Tele Tech Cebu started its operations last month, with 300 call center agents. Parekh said despite the competition in hiring qualified agents in Cebu with so many call centers coming in and expanding, TeleTech was able to hire at least 300 qualified agents in just two months. About 30 percent of which came from other call centers, with majority of 70 percent are fresh entrants in the industry. Unlike other call center firms, which suffered from high attrition rate, TeleTech is able to keep its employees and made them stay longer. Some have even reached to three years in service, because of its unique program to take care of its workforce. One of its strategies aside from establishing a work-friendly office environment is to bring the facility nearer to residential areas, instead of locating in a business district, to provide easy access to employees.

The Cebu Customer Management Center (CMC) located in Oakridge IT center in Mandaue City has two sprawling floors designed to provide call center agents with modern amenities and state of the art technology.

Tele Tech is a leading global business outsourcing (BPO) company based in Denver, Colorado. It provides a full range of front-to-back office outsourced solutions including customer management, transaction-based processing, and database marketing services.

The company has 46,000 employees worldwide and handles 2.7 million live customer interactions or calls over US$1 billion in commerce for its clients daily.

The company provides service to wide range of clientele in commercial, cable, satellite, insurance, retail chain, telecommunications, and airlines, among others. Most of its clients are in the Fortune 500 circle. President Arroyo to grace ICT Congress this month By Ehda M. Dagooc Staff Member

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has confirmed to formally open the upcoming International Congress on ICT set on November 16-18, 2006, at the Waterfront Cebu City Hotel and Casino.

This was announced by the organizer of the Congress, which is the second ICT stakeholders' gathering in Cebu this year that hopes to attract more than a thousand delegates from all over the Philippines, including representatives from 40 countries.

Arroyo has been pushing for the fast development of ICT (Information Communication Technology) sector in the Philippines, tagging the industry as an important employment generator.

Organized by the three government-owned institutions in the regional level, CHED, Tesda, and Department of Education together with other private institutions, like the Global Knowledge Partnership (GKP), Cebu International Distance Education College (CIDEC) among others will carry the theme "A Global Challenge in Education."

Arroyo was also the keynote speaker during the National ICT in Basic Education Congress hosted by the DepEd held in Cebu last few months ago.

Arroyo believes that there is a need for the Philippines to nurture the ICT capabilities as it is the wave of the future, saying "It (ICT) is the employment provider [of the country]." Renowned practitioners of e-learning and distance education, instructional designers, ICT trainers, teachers and other members of the academe will convene for the three-day congress. These participants will be identifying the challenges of integrating ICT in education, sharing knowledge on global ICT trends that could potentially enhance education in schools, and mining insights on how teachers can harness the power of ICT through innovative teaching strategies.

The Congress is considered as the most appropriate and effective venue that all practioners of e-learning, distance education, instructional designers, faculty, teachers and ICT trainers, would share information and experience on their ICT activities, discuss problems they encountered and explore possible ways of overcoming them, said CHED-7 regional director Enrique P. Grecia.

"We wanted to update the academe, students, teachers, and other stakeholders in ICT on the latest trend in technology right now. We hope to provide knowledge buildings [academe], and the students the update and prospects in technology," Grecia added. The Congress is going to highlight the topic on "Unfulfilled promises of the digital revolution and the many obstacles on the road towards Universality in Education."

Swiss Ambassador of Federal department of foreign affairs, Walter Fust, is set to discuss on this topic, to give participants a wider view of ICT development and its challenges in the worldwide landscape.