Due to the phenomenal growth of the call-center industry, other businesses have sprung up to cater to the sector’s needs. Among them are training centers that help applicants land that job.

Jay-ar Alegre admits that if he didn’t have prior call-center training, he wouldn’t have immediately landed his job as a technical support representative in Ambergris Solutions on his first attempt to cross the threshold of the burgeoning industry.

“The skills acquired from the training center sure did the trick,” he says. “Without the training, I won’t excel in this industry,” he articulates.

Alegre is only one of many agents who acknowledged how call-center training institutions help transform students into efficient and effective workers of the industry—that is now in need of manpower.

“The attrition rate is ailing the call-center industry,” concedes Jay Yulo, general manager of Call Center Academy (CCA), the Philippines’first call-center training institution focused on customer relationship management. “Around 30 percent leave the industry in every six months.”

Yulo adds that only five are eventually hired out of 100 applicants. “These are dismal passing rates,” he says.

Jane Lockwood, founder of FuturePerfect, which specializes in language consultancy and training for businesses, colleges and individuals, adds: “If we insist on these 95 applicants, it’s like asking someone who is unfit and overweight to become a tennis pro in a short period of time. You might have the slickest program and they may mimic some of the moves, but they have nothing to build that competence or capacity upon.”

She says of the 100 applicants, some 20 to 50 of these “almost-hired” individuals need more than a “trace of polishing” on their language.

“They may have sufficient language proficiency levels and adequate knowledge, but they’re not quite fair yet. They still need to be trained so that they can handle the skills required of them when they’re in the call centers,” explains Rea Anne Villanoza, FuturePerfect’s director of operations.

Recruitment for call centers is steady and fast-paced because the interest in the industry is growing. By 2010, more than a million Filipinos are expected to be employed in call centers, contributing some $12-billion revenues to the country.

Yet despite the rapid growth in employment offered by the industry, “people believe that there’s no career path out of being a costumer service representative,” notes Villanoza.

Thus call centers are striving to create career paths and options within the industry. “They’re reversing the notion that agents are ‘just’ agents, that they can also be administrators or supervisors in different parts of a certain company,” she says.

Lockwood adds that educational institutions are wasting their time trying to guess the capacity needs of the industry thus overlooking the language proficiency problem in the process, citing the “poorly trained language teachers” who “seriously misunderstand their roles.”

“Their lack of expertise exasperates the problem,” she complains.

A survey by the Business Processing Association of the Philippines found that English proficiency is among the top three areas the country needs to improve on as a call-center hub.

To address this concern, Congress has passed a law reviving English as primary medium of instruction for high school onwards. Also, the Department of Trade and Industry, in partnership with various educational institutions, have included Business Process Outsourcing (BPO)-related courses as part of the curriculum of some colleges and universities.

Recently, President Arroyo assigned the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (Tesda) to focus on training call-center agents under its Training for Work Scholarship Project (TWSP).

An academician, Lockwood also suggests that schools boost their language proficiency development and assessment processes—like what call-center training institutions are carrying out now—to address the manpower shortage.

Functional approaches

CONTACT centers are becoming aware that language audit, assessment and design, and delivery of dependable English training are avenues to finding the right people. “We are helping these people to hone their awareness about different languages and costumer relationship management,” CCA’s Yulo says.

Proper assessment, he says, is playing a role in the success of the industry right now. “And it’s good that agent wannabes are exerting more effort in developing and acquiring their tasks,” he adds.

There are several functional and communicative approaches to assessment and training, which, according to Yulo, could help diagnose people’s proficiency levels.

CCA claims that its students have a relatively high 40-percent to 60-percent passing rate in the industry. “We don’t only improve our students’ oral expression and ability to communicate effectively and spontaneously, but we also enhance their skills in sales and telemarketing, and culture familiarization,” Yulo boasts.

Teaching students to expect the worse from costumers, according to Jael Wenceslao, CCA’s marketing manager, will also help them cope better with the stresses in the industry. “It’s like an everyday thing to them when they’re already in call centers,” he says.

He also points out that the academy is in close communication with the contact-center industry to do calibration, ensuring that its courseware and curriculum are constantly updated.

If CCA’s graduates don’t make it, the academy endorses them to other call-center partners or telemarketing companies, or even coach them again.

Another approach that could address the attrition in contact centers, according to Villanoza, is granularization, which she says is a constructive way to coach and assess people’s competencies to penetrate into the industry.

Granularization—or having an idea of how each call-center account is processed—allows the call-center agents to be aware of the “complexity levels” of accounts in back office operations, medical transcription, payroll, among others. “There isn’t just one standard within a call center; there’s a variety,” she says.

The pragmatic aspect

THERE’S a common—albeit erroneous—belief that communication breakdown occurs at the pronunciation level.

“Problems don’t even occur at grammar level upon analysis of calls,” Villanoza clarifies. “Problems rather occur on interactive level,” she says, stressing that there is sociolinguistic aspect involved in whether the agents “can relate to the costumers who have varied cultural orientations.”

She says agents stumble and are unable to hold the conversation if they do not know the culture of the client that they’re dealing with.

“It’s not really significant that agents know how to speak well but how they are able to listen or pick up nuisances, in-betweens and implicit messages,” Villanoza points out.

“It’s not just about accent,” she adds. “It’s how a call-center agent was able to sustain the conversation, to formulate thoughts and to present them in a logical way.”

Aside from interaction and discourse deficiencies, most mistakes encountered by applicants are brought about by cultural or the “pragmatic” aspect of the language. Yulo identifies that there’s the lack of variety in the vowels, the incorrect syllable stress, and the lack of knowledge of how different American English is to the Filipino language.

“Our language is syllable-timed,” Villanoza notes. “In the Filipino language, all the letters are enunciated as opposed to English where words and some sounds are liaised.”

As a teacher of English and an applied linguist, FuturePerfect’s Lockwood expounds that one of the things that is very important in language development is the influence of the mother tongue and first-language culture on the second language being acquired.

“Generally, to develop pronunciation is to achieve a ‘globally’ comprehensible accent, where Filipino agents have no problem with,” Lockwood says. “They’re supple.”

Partnerships

ACCORDING to research firm META Group, the Philippines is the fourth worldwide in terms of availability of knowledgeable workers. And every year, about 400,000 students graduate from college, where, according to the European Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines, 75 percent have substandard English skills.

The CCA, being one of the bigger training firms, wants to become part of the mechanism to transform the graduates into skilled individuals by forging solid partnerships with the top call centers in the country.

Since the growth of the call-center industry hasn’t reached a plateau, it’s only a matter of time before expansion became necessary.

Yulo notes that CCA has the most number of call-center training centers nationwide—with branches in Pampanga, Bulacan, Manila, Laguna, Las Piñas, Libis and Mandaluyong—and is constantly expanding through a franchising program.

Through franchising, Yulo, believes CCA can also contribute to the economic development of these areas outside Metro Manila.

“When a branch of our training institution opens, it’s automatically in affiliation with the call centers near the institution. And there’s immediately an industry partner where graduates could work with,” he says.

He also points out that the industry has also supported the retailing sector, citing the number of 24-hour convenience stores and other retail outlets that have opened in areas where call centers are located.

But English-language training institutions are not only important to the call-center industry but to any business “where manpower should have a measurably good English proficiency in the workplace,” Villanoza says.

In fact, Villanoza says her company is helping revise the English curriculum of the Mapua Institute of Technology to boost the employment chances of their graduates. “But having them to be good in English and communication skills luckily make them much more marketable,” she adds.

Fly-by-night operations

But one problem that has cropped up is the swift mushrooming of fly-by-night training centers, which are luring students with cheap enrollment rates. Many of these illegal training schools have started to burgeon when the government has launched the President’s TWSP where it allocated P500 million to training institutions to increase employment in the BPO industry.

“These schools may seem to be callous and don’t have ambitions for their students, where after graduating, that’s matter-of-factly the end of their obligations to them,” says Wenceslao, adding that these illegal schools also exacerbate the misconceptions about the industry.

Despite the proliferation of call-center tranining schools. Accenture, one of the giant outsourcing firms in the country, notes that there are still a lot of students who aren’t equipped with the proper skills needed by the industry.

“We still see a lot of them failing. Maybe their curriculum is too focused on making their people sound like Americans [sic]. But once you set on how well they answer to open and ended questions, that’s where they fail,” explains Bernie Ladrido, Accenture’s senior manager.

“I advise applicants to seriously take their Communications I and II subjects in college,” he says.

BPO SCHOOLS

Jay-ar Alegre admits that if he didn’t have prior call-center training, he wouldn’t have immediately landed his job as a technical support representative in Ambergris Solutions on his first attempt to cross the threshold of the burgeoning industry.