What is constant in this world is change, even in technology. As technology evolves and so has the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry.
The BPO is a long-standing sector that gives businesses the chance to contract out a variety of front and back office duties to specialized service providers.
However, the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to change the game. AI is considered a powerful tool for improving BPO operations.
AI can automate many operations that were previously carried out by humans, freeing up BPO agents to concentrate on more difficult and high-value jobs. This is one manner in which AI is revolutionizing the BPO sector. This may result in greater effectiveness, lower costs, and higher quality.
On November 30, 2022, OpenAI developed and launched ChatGPT, which stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, which is a large language model-based chatbot.
George Michael ‘Mike’ Hao Bian, CEO and president of Six Eleven Global Services, not only sees AI to transform the BPO industry but also offers new opportunities and benefits to both service providers and clients.
“AI with ChatGPT is really popular. A lot of people are concerned about how AI will affect the industry. But the main thing that I’ve seen recently is that a lot of new things are coming like new job opportunities,” he said in an interview.
Six Eleven Global Services started in 2006 as the first locally-owned call center in Davao City and the entire Mindanao. It started as a small 16-seater call center and in the short span of time since then has developed into a full-blown corporation, employing approximately over 2,500 employees handling call center agents, the management, accounting, IT, HRD, security, and maintenance.
“In the past years, we’ve been doing primarily voice work but recently we’ve been doing data work. One of our growth this year is back office jobs meaning we do accounting, auditing, quality service monitoring,” Bian told Edge Davao.
He said one of the company’s projects is research and development and image annotation.
“And the point of image annotation is to feed office images towards the AI learning machines,” he said.
Starting as just a simple and single-account outbound telemarketing in 2006, the call center has grown to where it is now providing voice and non-voice, 24-hour inbound and outbound online customer support to 12 accounts.
Fast forward, the company is aiming to fill up 5,000 seats by 2025 to double its current 2,500 agents. Among its strategies to achieve that goal is to expand in Cagayan de Oro City.
“The Cagayan de Oro expansion is a step towards that goal. But year over year Six Eleven has shown that we are capable of growing the company and we are capable of finding clients who want to work with us. At the same time, we are capable of finding good people to join our organization,”. And on the side our BPO is strengthening our corporate community programs,” he said.
Currently, Six Eleven has 90 different clients covering 10 countries. Based on its latest census the top industry it caters to is e-commerce.
“Wherein people are selling items online or transacting online. That is 30 percent of our business as of the moment,” he said.
Today, Six Eleven is the largest and the most successful 100 percent Filipino-owned call center, which is based right here in Davao City.
The company continues offering a competitive compensation package, professionalism is being promoted to employees at all levels and those with outstanding performance are always recognized and rewarded. Employees are treated as equals and partners.
All these, including attractive incentive packages, have made employees decide to stay with Six Eleven Global Services.
Because of Bian’s vision and entrepreneurial spirit, he was featured in the January 2008 issue of Entrepreneur Magazine.
He said it is always the intention of the company to grow and as it grows it is also able to get better opportunities for its staff.
“There are a lot of our people who are waiting for their time to shine. They are just waiting to be promoted. But if the organization is stagnating then there would be no growth. On our end, we always intend to grow our company. Right now we are going to Cagayan de Oro for our newest site and this will open a lot of our growth opportunities for our people. Because of this growth our agents become team leaders and team leaders become operations managers,” . They have a clear attainable career pathway “ he said.
Six Eleven is looking at geographical redundancy by spreading out more, and Cagayan de Oro is the next option for operation after Davao City, and even AI cannot stop that vision.
While there are some challenges to implementing AI in BPO, Bian sees that AI will become an important tool for the company to improve its operations and offer more value to its clients.
“Yes, AI will come, it will happen. Things will change but there will always be opportunities,” he said.
