What is the Future of BPO in Cebu, PH?

What is the Future of BPO in Cebu, PH?

Among others, this question was the highlight of an interesting and dynamic forum among BPO executives in Cebu, organized by Payoneer, a leading global payment platform for BPO companies.

Cebu tele-net’s Chief Sales Officer, Mr. Anthony “Silver” Cepeda, together with his Business Development Manager, Mr. Kristian Jason Cablao, attended the event to network and to listen and share insights about the pressing challenges and opportunities that come with the current global economic shifts in the new normal.

The forum, comprised of a number of BPO owners, executives, and industry leaders in Cebu, identified the challenge of transitioning to a Hybrid, if not full remote, set-up as an indentifiable trend in outsourcing today. A few start-ups providing VAs and remote teams shared their experiences and insights about this supposed “future of work”. CIB.O (Cebu IT-BPM Org) executive, Mr. Buddy Villasis, shared some industry developments and the need for a coordinated approach to recurring BPO challenges of attrition, industry mismatch, recruitment, and employee retention.

As an industry leader himself, Cebu tele-net‘s CSO (Silver), stirred the discussion to realities on the ground. That while it is exciting and admirable to readily adapt to the working culture of some remote talents, it is imperative that as decisions makers, we must continue the hard work of strengthening and maintaining our fundamentals—People Management, Data Security, and Lean Operations. These fundamentals remain the backbone of any BPO success story, no matter the business model or the market niche and sadly these same fundamentals are placed at risk by current shifts in the industry.

As Silver puts it, “at the end of the day, it all boils down to cost. Outsourcing exists because we are able to provide cost-effective solutions to our clients and we operate “Lean” in order to maintain healthy margins that would provide us legroom for growth.” This is the core “Big Idea” of the BPO. To survive these shifts and truly thrive today, all BPO stakeholder must not forget its core.

In the past thirty years, Cebu tele-net has nurtured this core, has strengthened its fundamentals by making hard decisions that sustain and make Cebu tele-net thrive in a competitive BPO industry in the Philippines. It started like most of the companies in attendance, from being a small call center a few years ago to now being the largest Japanese owned BPO company in the Philippines.