Davao-Based BPO Aims To Double Seats By 2025

Davao-based business process outsourcing (BPO) firm Six Eleven Global Services and Solution is aiming to fill up 5,000 seats by 2025 to double its current 2,500 agents

Photo Insert: Six Eleven employees are more productive in its pleasant, well-appointed environment with spaces for relaxation and recreation.

In a statement, Six Eleven CEO Michael Bian said they have gone a long way from only 20 agents 18 years ago when the call center was established in 2005.

Bian, the son of enterprising educator Jojie Ilagan Bian, said they were able to grow the company by living up to its name of fixing up problems and helping customers or by putting people first at the heart of their operations.

According to Bian, Six Eleven was an offshoot of the JIB e-Academy, a training school for call center agents established by his mother, who is also running several schools in Mindanao.

Since there were only two call centers in the Davao region at that time, the family established the BPO firm to give jobs to JIB e-Academy graduates without having to look for work in the Visayas or Luzon.

Bian, a Humanities graduate at the University of Asia and the Pacific, said that his degree has taught him to understand the nuances of society and to think out of the box. The younger Bian said that a competitive salary is not the only reason for people wanting to work at Six Eleven.

Employees are more productive in its pleasant, well-appointed environment with spaces for relaxation and recreation. Beyond work, the employees engage in family days, wellness activities, and team-building programs.

The management keeps the communication line open with the employees, hence, the low turnover. Bian said the company gives them time to adapt to the working conditions instead of putting them under time pressure to perform.

The agents likewise enjoy the wide communities of their clients where they learn new things in a different cultural context.

Technological innovations are progressively blurring the lines between call centers, which specialize in telecommunications customer support, and business process outsourcing, which handles back-end work and processing data, annotating, and tagging. Six Eleven is adept at both, he said.

Six Eleven agents are also conditioned to handle the stress of demanding clients. “It’s a matter of perspective. People don’t call up just to say ‘Hi’ but to find a way to fix a problem. We are problem solvers for the callers. That’s why we have a job,” he said.

According to Bian, their clients like dealing with Six Eleven agents because they are responsive to their needs. “It goes back to being grateful to our clients for giving opportunities to the company. Without them there is no work,” said the CEO.

The company services 90 clients worldwide in such industries as health care, technology, e-commerce retail, customer service, telemarketing, and back-of-office support. Bian attributes the growth to the high rate of satisfied international clients who refer the Davao-based company to their colleagues

Yet, Bian has to manage their expectations “Our strategy is to be realistic and to be clear with about we can do. We can train our agents to meet their standards and we make sure that we can achieve it.”

The CEO adds that while other companies cater only to large enterprises, Six Eleven also serves small and medium-scale enterprises.

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