The CEO and COO of KUNNECT recently visited the Philippines to launch its call center technology solutions to the Philippine BPO market. Fred Cote, co-founder and CEO, spoke at the October 12 meeting of the members of the Call Center Association of the Philippines (CCAP) in Shangri-La Hotel Makati. Mr. Cote presented KUNNECT as a viable, inexpensive call center solution for immediate operations without the need for costly and time-consuming setup, calling it the “best in its class” of a full suite of call center features and functionality. Together with Mr. Cote were Chris Persaud, COO of KUNNECT, and Raffy Pekson II, the Country Representative of KUNNECT in the Philippines.

In Mr. Cote’s talk, he presented two new subscription plans, specially created for the Philippines, at half-the-price rates: Plan 100 for $100 per month, per seat, with unlimited calls within North America at a 1-year commitment contract, and Plan 125 for $125 per month, per seat, unlimited calls and a 6-month commitment contract. KUNNECT has two regular monthly plans with no commitment contract (start and stop anytime): the Basic Plan of $50 per month, per seat, plus toll charges, and the Unlimited Plan of $199 per month, per seat, with unlimited calls within North America. “Someone has yet to beat our $100 plan.  We are setting a new standard.” adds Mr. Cote of KUNNECT’S web-based SAAS call center offering.

During their two-week stay in the Philippines, Messieurs Cote and Persaud personally presented KUNNECT and met with the management teams of several call centers, and also non-call center companies that want to set up small, internally-controlled call centers for their sales, marketing, service and support business requirements. Mr. Pekson said that some prospective clients remarked that the main enticing feature of KUNNECT’S offer, besides the price, is one’s ability to start immediately without the high setup and maintenance costs.

KUNNECT is a global Tier-2 class telecommunications carrier with offices in the U.S., Canada, France and Germany, and does about 6 billion calls a year through its network, according to Mr. Cote.  “The amazing thing about the Philippine’s business and commercial broadband internet service is that all the telecommunications companies in the country first land their internet pop in One Wilshire, Los Angeles, which is where KUNNECT is co-located.   This helps eliminate any downtime due to latency problems, as well as ensure the shortest possible route to a business.” (Latency is defined as the round-trip time it takes to access an IP address or a website, measured in milliseconds).

Aside from its popular hosted call center solution, KUNNECT also sells a premise-based, enterprise version for call centers that want to host their own solution. For details about KUNNECT’S solutions, get in touch with Raffy Pekson, KUNNECT’S Country Representative in Manila, at 501-3025 and 0927-726-9949, or e-mail him at raffy@kunnect.com. You can also visit their website at www.kunnect.ph for more information.

A long time ago not too far away, everything had a price tag because there were not much options available. If something was given away for free, it was more of a privilege than the norm. “Buy One Get One Free” and other big sales promotions were never much of a big deal as life was good, simple and easy.

Today, when something free is offered, everyone goes out of their way to get into the action. A “Big Sale” event is enough reason to change one’s daily routine or make a snap decision to drop everything and tell your spouse, “let’s go – now!” That’s exactly what happened when I spent the day at the Bonifacio High Street commercial area inside The Fort after attending a BCBP fellowship breakfast. My good friend and I hopped from one retail outlet to another window shopping and ended up at Starbucks for more banter before calling it a night. When we left the café at around 7:30 PM, we were surprised to see hundreds of people loitering around the two-block area. I realized they were all waiting for a free view of the scheduled Pyro Olympics. Unfortunately, many of them didn’t know that that Saturday’s show has already been rescheduled and moved to January 2010 because of the previous Saturday’s fireworks competition between China and Germany turning out to be a rainy night and thus spoiled the show.

Starbucks inside Fully Booked at the Bonifacio High Street, The Fort

I’m an ardent fan of anything free. In fact, my moniker for this is “free, fast and forever” – the three F’s of things that are must haves for anything that being offered for free. When “free” fails the two remaining F’s, it’s not enticing to continue the service.

However, some things will never come for free. There was a long go internet site that offered free phone calls to any US number (I couldn’t put my finger in it but it started with the letter “S”) but eventually stopped giving its service for free because (probably) of the cost of providing it for free was just too much. So, in the spirit of “free,” I’ve compiled a short list of things I use for my business matters that’s “free, fast and (hopefully) forever.”

Skype – still the best free PC-to-PC voice service

Skype is still the best-in-quality, VOIP-based, chat-and-talk, web-based solution

Skype is the best peer-to-peer voice platform using the internet that’s been around for free and has maintained the quality of service I expect a voice provider to do. Yahoo Messenger et al also provides the same service but their voice quality isn’t as good as Skype. Though I chat with friends, I try not to do this with my North American clients. In fact, many of the latter don’t even maintain a chat account because they’d rather speak than type. I would e-mail clients asking for a good date and time to speak to each other using Skype because in my experience, business transactions are done better by talking to each other. Through the e-mail message, I ask my prospective client if he has a Skype account and schedule a date and time to discuss doing business with each other. One thing I will never do is discusss a business opportunity using e-mail, which many Asians like Filipinos try to do. North Americans and Europeans actually prefer talking than writing. Filipinos love doing the reverse; why do you think text messaging is a huge success in the country?

The Inexpensive Philippine Long Distance Telephone Solutions

Globe TipIDD prepaid card allows you to call North America for 2.50 Pesos per minute

If your client does not have a Skype account, immediately offer to call him instead – don’t even think about asking him to create a Skype account. Please. Also, this is a business opportunity for you so don’t make the mistake of assuming he will call you in the Philippines. In today’s telecommunications world, it’s actually cheaper to call North America from the Philippines than the reverse. There are inexpensive ways I call my North American clients. I can buy a Globe TipIDD card for my Globe landline which gives me 40 minutes of talk time to the US or Canada for 100 Pesos, or the PLDT Budget Card that gives me 30 minutes for 100 Pesos or 60 minutes for 200 Pesos. If I’m not around a landline, I can use my Globe mobile phone and dial 12800, the country code, area code and telephone number, and get charged about 7 to 10 Pesos per minute, half of the regular 20 Pesos per minute cost. You can also buy the popular Magic Jack product that allows you unlimited calls in the US which retails for about 4,000 Pesos. However, before you complain how lousy the service is, remember that the weakest link to an internet-based telephone system is your internet bandwidth. Using a poor DSL connection will definitely make the quality of service bad. In technical terms, traditional VOIP-based services require 64 kbps of simultaneous upload and download speed. DSL connections don’t have any bandwidth commitment so even if you have a 2 Mbps DSL connection, it can drop to zero in a second or two, then climb up back to its subscribed speed, drop down and up again. That’s why call centers in the Philippines pay thousands of Dollars to subscribe to internet lines that maintain the required simultaneous upload-download speeds.

You can buy prepaid minutes from Global Access anytime.

You can also buy prepaid minutes from a service provider they call a “termination service provider,” one who sets up VOIP lines and terminates your VOIP call to a North American telephone number. If you prepay and buy around 2,000 minutes at a high price of $0.03 per minute, that’s about 2,760 Pesos worth but valued only at about 1.38 Pesos per minute, still lower than the prepaid card landline providers Globe and PLDT. All you need is to download a freeware called “X-Lite”, configure the user ID, password and domain IP address and you’re set to call North America at cheap rates. I’ve used www.globalaccesscomm.com before for this kind of service. I bought 20,000 minutes worth at $0.015 per minute rate. They are located at the 21st floor of Prestige Building along F.Ortigas Jr. Ave. (formerly Emerald Ave.) where you can pay by check or Peso or Dollar cash in person.

Get a Corporate E-mail Address for $10 a year

In today’s wired world, many in business continue to use free e-mail services like Yahoo, G-Mail, Hotmail and the like. That’s great for personal e-mails and the like. However, you must professionalize your corporate image by using an e-mail address that depicts your business, e.g. myname@company.com You normally have to buy an e-mail hosting solution that will cost about $50 to $100 a year. I did it the cheaper way but let me explain below.

GoDaddy.com is a popular domain and hosting provider with good phone support, even from the Philippines

First, I bought a domain name from GoDaddy.com for about $10 a year – it’s cheaper if you purchase the two or three year subscription. I know of only two very popular free e-mail hosting sites that offer hosting your organization’s domain for free – that’s Hotmail/Live.com and Gmail.com. I’m sure there are hundreds of others out there but I stuck it out with an e-mail hosting site that I’m already used to the graphical user interface (“GUI”). You can use Google Apps Standard Edition (go to http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html) to set up your corporate e-mail account for free, including Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Site. I can’t find the link to Live.com’s version but I’m sure the free e-mail hosting feature is still there. If you’d like to use other free e-mail hosting service, that’s okay, too. Whichever you use, your e-mail hosting provider should give you easy-to-understand instructions to point your domain’s e-mail IP address to the new email hosting platform you’re going to use. If what you’re reading still sounds too Greek, copy or print all the instructions of your free e-mail hosting provider and call GoDaddy.com. in about 10 minutes, they’ll have your domain settings changed and pointed to your free e-mail hosting provider for you. C’mon! 10 minutes of a long-distance telephone call to a US number is peanuts compared to the anxiety of having a domain name you can’t even use. Trust me when I say e-mail will not work right away – the tendency is to keep bouncing e-mails between your domain provider and yourself until the former clearly understands what it is you’re in need of help for.

Blogging as a Corporate Website

Wordpress offers everything FREE - free blog hosting or download their entire blogging program for free

Today’s corporate websites now copy the format or actually use free blog sites like Blogger/Blogspot and WordPress. I’m a WordPress user but other blogging sites are just as easy to use. However, WordPress.com also offers their entire blogging software free to download at WordPress.org. This entire software is something you can use and alter when you have your own web hosting space. But start with the free blog hosting site like WordPress.com before attempting to buy a hosting package and use the WordPress.org program. I bought a personal domain name in April and pointed it to my WordPress.com site, i.e. www.company.com points to company.wordpress.com. After six months of using the free WordPress.com blog space and getting a good feel about WordPress and the activity of blogging, it was time for me to buy a hosting package. Before I did, I looked for a free but better looking WordPress theme (like the themes of your mobile phone) that would now professionalize (or personalize) the look and feel of my original blog. I bought a $50 per year hosting package from GoDaddy.com that’s WordPress-ready. When I found the free WordPress theme that I liked, I downloaded it into my new WordPress hosting package.

Blogging is now the new method of providing content to web visitors besides media publication or communications companies. Even CNN uses the free WordPress.org program in their website. Now that people are so used to reading blogs, the old-world way of creating a catalog-looking website is passé. Your corporate site now needs to be updated, at least, on a weekly basis; otherwise, people will visit you twice and never return because nothing changed in your site or nothing interesting exists. Content is now king – either you develop your own content or hire the services of other people to develop content for you. You can become an employer at oDesk.com to have freelance content writers bid for your project or get your relative, friend or acquaintance to help – besides hiring someone the traditional way.

Conference Calling the United States for Free

Freeconference.com is by far an established multi-party telephone conference solution that FREE to use.

When I need a three-party conference call that involves a North American entity, I always use www.freeconference.com to set up the bridge conference telephone number. This simply means everyone must call a US telephone number, enter the PIN code and start talking to each other. If it involves a Philippine company calling the US number, I always give my two-cents of suggestions on the inexpensive ways to call the US as I described above. Freeconference.com allows you to set up as many participants as you want and up to four hours of talk time without paying a single cent. It also allows you to auto-email all the participants with an attached Outlook-formatted calendar file. Recording the conference used to be free but is now a paid service. However, I don’t usually need to record conference calls as all of my telephone meetings are exploratory and discussion-based – writing out my notes using pen and paper has always been easier than being lazy and just recording the conversation. After the telephone meeting, I always create and e-mail everyone an after-conference report to document everything and allow the other participants to review and even add their comments or things that I missed jotting down. I’ve been using Freeconference.com since 2005.

Here’s a realization: most countries’ long-distance calling rates to the United States is cheaper than two Third World countries calling each other. So, if I have that situation, it actually becomes more cost-effective to call a U.S. bridge conferencing telephone number, like Freeconference.com, than calling each other long distance. For example, I’m currently dealing with a call center in Guyana. Initially, I started a Freeconference.com US-based telephone number until we became more familiar with each other and relied on Skype in our following conversations.

Online Address Books with Birthday Reminders

Plaxo.com has been around for a long time. I use it for being reminded of birthdays and sending Plaxo e-Cards to e-mail addresses.

For address books, I used to use Plaxo.com because it provided free use of its “export to file” feature; today, you have to pay for that. However, I still rely on it to remind me of birthdays and so I continue to update it every time I receive a new business card. It automatically invites my new contact to check and revise my entries even without forcing my new contact to join Plaxo. This is good because some systems force you to join their online service before allowing you to update or change detailed information. One field that’s always there is the birthday field. Birthdays are important for me in business because it is the most important event for a person without having to know his nationality or religion. Remembering someone’s birthday is a great relationship-building activity you can do to someone who many not give you business today but may do so in an unforeseen future. A great example is an e-mail acquaintance of mine from Toronto (I’ll call him Martin). We met in a Yahoo Group because we both worked for the call center industry in 2002. I kept tabs with him every year when I greeted him on his birthday and we’d continue to exchange a few more e-mails right after greeting him until the conversation dies down and I greet him the following year. Four years later, when I greeted him on his birthday, I also told him I was setting up a call center and wondered if he could help point me to a good campaign. Lo and behold he pointed me to his good friend (who I’ll call Cathy) who worked for the largest trade publication company in the world. Because Martin was a good friend of Cathy, she obliged to conference call with me. In the end, I won the hearts of Cathy and her team to be one of the outsourced call centers for their business.

Hotspots as My Office

Coffee Bean reestablished itself as a telecommuting-friendly cafe with FREE wi-fi. But it still lacks the electrical outlets power-users look for.

For some years, I’ve been a street-side businessman, always out meeting with people, marketing and selling myself and my products or services outside the workplace. Because I’m very much involved in internet-based networking, correspondences and communications, I rely on hotspots to do my business. Though there were enticing options to get a serviced office workstation or e-office, I declined knowing I would probably spend only an hour in the office and get out doing my work in coffee shops that have wi-fi access. Today, Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf offers the best and notebook-friendly free wi-fi hotspot in Manila. I bought a “Swirl Card” that gives me rewards points plus the WEP key or password to access their wi-fi system. A funny story about Coffee Bean’s internet is a recent experience with a prospective client. As a Country Representative of Kunnect.com, I conduct on-the-spot demo of the Software-as-a-Service (“SaaS”) besides my traditional presentation. Once, I did this at New World Renaissance Hotel. It had terrible internet with lots of timeouts. When I told the prospect if he wouldn’t mind walking to the Coffee Bean branch at Greenbelt 3, he was surprised how fast the internet was at the cafe compared with the hotel. The most quiet branch of Coffee Bean I’ve been to is at the ground floor of the Greenbelt Residences condominium, right across Greenbelt 2. It’s a lot smaller than that of Greenbelt 3 or Robinson’s Galleria mall. By the way, all Coffee Bean branches are hotspots.

A quiet, telecommuter-friendly, FREE wi-fi cafe.

Besides Coffee Bean, I also choose Blenz, the Canadian coffee shop that only has two branches: at Solaris One Building along dela Rosa street in Makati City and another one at SM Megamall. It’s got a good ambience, quiet, not much people so it isn’t noisy and lots of electrical outlets in case your laptop runs out of battery power. However, Blenz is not that easy to find as the shop isn’t a street-view cafe and not everyone knows where Solaris One building is. It’s got free wi-fi with any amount of purchase.

Other hotspots I go to conduct meetings are Chili’s in Greenbelt 5, Bubba Gump at Greenbelt 3 (they have an airconditioned smoking area, just like Coffee Bean at the Robinson’s Galleria mall) and TGI Fridays at Glorietta 3. Now, here’s a tip: Globe DSL has been installing their wi-fi routers to new subscribers, including businesses such as restaurants. The funny thing they do is that the default WEP key or password is “aabbccddee” using the SSID “aztech”. So, if you’re in an area where you see the same SSID or even “linksys”, try to see if they have the same password. Chili’s obviously uses Globe because when I asked for the WEP key, the server replied “aabbccddee”.

I use Globe Visibility because I'm usually at an Ayala-owned place.

However, when I’m stuck in a place without free wi-fi, I always have my Globe Visibility USB-based internet dongle (this is the predecessor of the Globe Tattoo). Why did I choose Globe? Well, I usually conduct my meetings in Ayala malls and Globe is an Ayala company; so, naturally, Globe’s signal would be far better in Ayala malls than competing products like SmartBro and Sun cellular. If you’re the type who always goes to the province, I think SmartBro would be better because Smart’s provincial coverage is better than Globe. For someone who’s always in a Robinsons mall, go for the Sun Cellular version. For a prepaid internet dongle, it costs about 20 Pesos per hour for internet access that can ideally reach 3 Mbps but about a maximum of 2 Mbps for HSDPA access in a 3G environment.

In Summary

I’m sure there are many other things that you do that would benefit you if some provider offered it for free or at a very reduced price, like text messaging (I used Globe’s Immortal Text; for 10 Pesos, I get 50 free text messages to other Globe or Touch Mobile subscribers plus 10 free text messages to people using other networks without an expiration date). But for this literary piece, I’ll stick to these basic items I mentioned that continues to be my source of free or inexpensive ways of doing business in our very competitive world. I do hope some of these tips and experiences can help you with your work as it has done with me. If you’re using a whole lot more that can help the readers, please share us your tips on “free, fast and forever.”

It’s been weeks since I attended Randell Tiongson’s “No Nonsense Seminar on Financial Planning,” more often referred to as a personal finance seminar. I met Randell after having e-mailed him a few times and asked if we could meet – I had a web project then that needed writers of his stature for enticing the North American market to come to the Philippines besides vacationing. This involved not only retiring in the country but more towards investing and hiring (or outsourcing), to name a few. The only thing we had in common was our high school alma mater.

Several months later, I attended his first free seminar and wrote about it. I probably jotted down more things about the event than the content of his free seminar. My inkling was to mark some role in the growing blogging community as “one of the guys,” so to speak. Still, months later, Randell came out with his first “not free” seminar but I wasn’t able to attend because of some pressing commitment I had to do. When he announced that he was going for a repeat, I made sure I’d attend.

Using Randell’s term for the one-afternoon session filled with alien jargon on finance, it was a “nosebleed!” However, it wasn’t much about the swirls of financial terminologies that silently drove me nuts – it was the realization that I should have done what Randell was telling me (and the others who attended) to do early on in my life, not in my mid-forties. During the session, my mind floated out to people I know who are still climbing into the prime of their lives and would love to convince them to attend Randell’s eye-opener seminar as young professionals, and not in their maturing years where the time to make mistakes isn’t anymore a luxury.

Here’s my “blinding glimpse of the obvious,” as a phrase I keep borrowing from the infamous book “Barbarian at the Gates”: all my life, someone took care of my personal finance. As a young professional, my parents were my personal finance advisers and accountants. Even if I would earn my keep at work, I would still end up losing my recent salary on useless spending sprees. Ever the generous parents of a middle-income household, they would oblige to continue giving me extra money, use their car, eat their food, live in their house, and have my clothes washed and cleaned – a practical dependent to parents who should have already started to think about their retirement. When I got married, my dear wife took care of our household expenses and, in that respect, my personal finance and accounting matters. When we hit some rough financial times, she managed our family expenses and balanced our personal financial needs until I came out swinging again – and she was good at it!

When I went back to the Philippines from Canada and ventured into entrepreneurship with friends, I relied on one of these people to take care of my personal finance. I had no personal accounting on revenue or expenses, even if I probably tried a hundred times. I could teach people how to create profit and loss presentations for businesses but I would fail doing one for myself.

My two-cents of practical advise to those in their mid-twenties to as late as the mid-thirties – start managing your personal finance today. The key word here is “personal.” It’s not about family finance, not company finance nor is it someone else’s personal finance. This is managing what you earn, what you spend and where to invest the extra money you save, the latter of which is something many Filipinos procrastinate about. It’s not being selfish – it’s being prudent. You can share information with your parents, spouse or life partner but you need to learn how to manage your money today. Randell’s seminar, though short as it was only an afternoon session, gave the attendees a glimpse at what one should start doing today. (The implicit pun is what you should have started doing a long time ago.) If you are already investing, is it a wise investment carefully planned, assessed and executed, or are you just like many of us being lured by the promise of extravagant rewards coming from friends and peers (worse, family members)? That’s the thing about personal finance – it’s a three-way street: income, expense and savings. A better word for the latter is “investments.”

Randell Tiongson and me

Randell  is a Registered Financial Planner (RFP) in the Philippines and does his seminars out of the goodness of his heart. He’s an active parishioner of the Victory Christian Fellowship (VCF), an ardent advocate of personal finance management, a loving husband (you should read his Facebook dedications to his wife) and a good father (his daughter kept shooting photos during the seminar). After getting to know and talk to Randell more, we started tallying-up common friends. Randell went to the City of Smiles (that’s Bacolod City) to run the same seminar. However, I do hope he could conduct a three-peat in Manila as I’d love to invite people whose faces crossed my mind when it wandered while listening to Randell will attend the third event.

Are call center training schools really producing candidates for the various small or large call center companies around the country with inadequate skills for promotion? Is the Philippines creating a population akin to factory workers of decades ago hype? Is the call center industry in the verge of imploding because of the increasing cost of training only entry level people, driving the cost of outsourcing in the Philippines higher?

My personal answer to all three questions is yes – many call center agents enter the corporate world without the right skills to succumb not only the graveyard shift but to tackle organizational ponderings. These entry-level employees are just like the thousands of factory workers of the past that did robotic tasks day in, day out. Today, the call center agents are like parrots, mimicking scripts rather than understanding their work and their role. In fact, many call center agents do not even finish college because call center companies started accepting undergraduates years back. Teens and the Yuppies would rather get a paycheck than finish their studies. That’s a sad realization today. At least before, factory workers worked without achieving a college degree simply because they couldn’t afford to pay tuition.

But, let me throw a question that may change the entire call center education landscape. What if there is a technology that could allow training schools more courses to teach besides just the usual lessons on becoming a good call center agent? What if this technology can give colleges and universities the chance to create a call center degree, exactly what the computer revolution of the 60’s and 70’s created multitudes of degrees in computer science starting in the 70’s and the 80’s.

Today, there aren’t enough retirees from the call center industry to provide a big pool of professors capable of teaching the entire process cycle of call center operations. A few managers have resigned because of burn out and you don’t want those kinds of people teaching kids a future career with angst and complains. I believe technology may provide a means to create new and better coursewares beyond the norm of just training a Filipino to be a call center agent. If the schools were given access to a good call center technology, then it can creatively position their students to become graduating professionals capable of providing skills and knowhow beyond the existing entry-level training system and allow call center companies to easily integrate these new human resources into their organizations without having to spend too much on organizational development, post-agent skills and a lot of coaching and mentoring –  just to explain what kind of career the agent can have.

Call center agents of the past

So, rather than stick with the norm and continue producing factory workers for the call center industry, why not start creating call center professionals who will be prepared for a call center career? Not just a job but a real career in the call center. When these new graduates enter the call center company, they already know how it operates because they were taught several hands-on courses on each of the job position in a typical call center organization. Everyone can teach theory but if there is no practical approach to experience the real world, it may not correctly benefit the students. For someone educated in this new way, they may now know exactly what kind of role they want to pursue after being hired as an agent. A few may have decided that in 5 or 10 years from now, they want to manage a specific kind of department. Isn’t this better than exerting a mountain of effort in developing a neophyte call center employee who’s education had nothing to do with the other aspects of the call center organization? Won’t it benefit the companies to lower their cost of training and organizational development because agents already have a general idea and basic hands-on skill to handle other kinds of work past their entry-level agent job?

If you are managing a training institution or a school department that currently provides short courses on how to be a call center agent, and are interested in this technology that can allow you to produce better graduates, contact me and let’s talk about what this technology can do for you and your school.

If you are managing a college or university that’s thinking of incorporating call center courses but do not know how to start it off or what to offer, contact me and let’s talk about how this technology can create a new kind of educational offering to the public.

If you are an entrepreneur geared towards setting up an academic institution but have no idea what kind of call center courses you’d like to offer or begin with, contact me and let’s talk about this technology that can spur your creativity to begin something others have not yet even thought about.

My foreign principals have agreed to provide the academic establishment of the Philippines “FREE” use of their call center solution. This “Corporate Social Responsibility” is not being offered elsewhere – they have agreed to spin it off “first” in the Philippines. The corporate entity is not a fly-by-night organization but a robust and financially stable North American company whose management team are very familiar with the Philippines. Some of them been in the country several times in the past marketing and supporting other call center solutions. This is not like a Microsoft deal where schools are given huge discounts – it is free without any fine print attached to it. The only thing they ask is that schools will use it for call center training to benefit the academic community and the call center industry in the Philippines.

Please note that I am a “Country Representative” of the North American technology company, which means they have no physical and corporate presence in the Philippines other than myself as their sole representative. So, if you ask for my time to meet with you and present the matter of this free technology, I can do so at my availability and convenient location. Rest assured my intention and that of my principals is to propel the Philippines beyond today’s factory worker training style of call center agents and make the country the best location for call center outsourcing in the region, if not the world. To do this, it has to begin with real education. That’s where you come in. That’s your role. So, let’s help each other.