Poor English skills hamper call center manpower needs

With the rapidly growing BPO and call center industry in Cebu, demand for call center agents is naturally rising just as fast but due to the lack of English proficiency, regionalized accent, and poor confidence level, only a few actually gets hired by the BPO companies.

According to the Call Center Academy- Cebu Campus Center Manager Glynna F. Crystal in an interview, there are actually only about two to five percent of applicants who are hired by call center and BPO companies; reason of this small number is the regional accent and low exposure to contact center realities.

She said that having noticed this inadequacy and the demand of the contact center industry for efficient agents, CCA decided to operate and has been recognized as the pioneer training school for call center in the country. They expose their students to the real world of contact centers to prepare them for the scenario during their actual application.

Call Center Academy provides professionals, non-professionals and career shifters like engineers, nurses, businessmen among others an option to improve their English language proficiency, accent, and their personality before they get to apply for a career in a call center company.

“We teach intensive English communication and put them in the actual situation where they are exposed to irate callers. We also give them mock interviews so that they can improve on organizing their thoughts and also we bombard them with activities that can boast their self-confidence,” said Crystal.

She added that boasting the confidence level of their students is very much important as it will prepare them for actual application. She said that those applicants who do not qualify have usually chickened out from interviews. “We don’t endorse them if they are not 99% prepared. So we evaluate them first before they get endorsed. But our relationship with our students is only cut once they are already happily working with our call center partners,” underscored Crystal.

CCA endorses their qualified students to their 40 contact center partners from all over the country. Crystal revealed that competition between different contact center companies these days have also grown intensely especially with the huge backlog of agents. “They are competing to get our graduates because they need many agents to fill their growing business,” she added.

CCA, a TESDA accredited company, offers 100 hours program module for 24 days. They were awarded as the “2006 Most Outstanding Call Center Training Academy” by the Global Awards for Marketing Excellence, the “2005 Most Outstanding Call Center Training Academy” by the Philippine marketing Excellence Awards Institute and they were nominated as the “Fastest Growing BPO Company” by the Canadian Chamber of Commerce.