Paul Birdseye
Executive Vice-President, Country Manager
Vision-X (Phil) Inc.

Education:
BS in Business Management, Summa Cum Laude - California Lutheran University, (2000) (SBD National Honors Society).

City & Guilds, Electrical Technicians, Full Technological Certificate, Crawley Technical College, Sussex, UK. (’79)

Electronics Technician Apprenticeship (3yr) - Monotype International, Redhill, Surrey, UK (’77)

Pls. tell us how you got into call centers.

I was born in the United Kingdom and worked in the technical side of the printing industry for many years.  In 2000, I re-invented myself by going into the call center industry.  I started with one call center in Los Angeles, and ran their St. Louis operation before joining Vision X.

This was the time when everyone thought that the clocks would stop and everything would stop working, and there was a lot of fear about the millennium bug.  It seems like a long way these days, but  many clients were not buying products, and many industries were changing, merging, and quite dramatically. 

I decided to make a career change.  I’d been in Customer Service my entire life, management in many of those years.  I wanted to go into somewhere where I can use my skills in customer service and yet experience something new. That’s the time of the dot-com boom and contact centers were springing up, along with chat, voice, e-mail, text.

Pls. describe your career path.

I  joined this call center as part of their Client Management Team as Account Manager. I deliberately joined that particular part of the business because it had a 360 degree view of everything that was going on. I was learning e-commerce and what was happening in the industry.  I was able to work with sales, marketing, operations, training, and get a good view of the industry. In a very short time, I went  from managing accounts to implementations  – I managed the entire transition when they closed the Los Angeles site.  I managed the transition of 42 clients from Los Angeles to Manila and St. Louis.  Once that transition was completed, I went to St. Louis and ran the center there.

In the space of a couple of years, I went from account management to call center director, partly based on my previous experience and partly based on the speed with which I was able to absorb the call center industry and its needs.

How did you get to the Philippines?

I came to the Philippines about three and a half years ago now, permanently, after a couple of times prior to that for visits  with the first call center I worked for and Vision X.  It’s been a bit of a joke around here. My boss who’s the Chief Operations Officer asked me to come out to the Philippines for three to five weeks to help in the transition of some programs from Los Angeles to Manila.  The joke is---I’ve been here ever since.  It’s pretty much an accurate statement.  At the time, I was director of operations for Vision X handling the major clients and the major transitions.  I felt that my COO wanted me to be in the Philippines, which was where the action was from operations’ perspective.  I told my boss that I would be very happy to be here as long as he wanted me here.

A year after my tenure, I was promoted to vice-president for operations, I largely handled in-bound clients. Our business was transition, building up my center from when it was mainly outbound and we’re about 85 percent in-bound now.  I took over the entire operations in August of last year.

What were the adjustments, especially in the workplace?

One of the things that you learn as an expat here is that you cannot expect to manage a Filipino workforce the way you expect to manage an American workforce. The mindsets are different.  You have to take the trouble to understand those things and consider them in your relationship with the workforce and in getting the best out of them. 

If you are not prepared to do that, and I’ve seen some and watched of my colleagues in similar positions who are trying to manage the way they’ve managed in their home countries, it doesn’t work.  

It’s one of the reasons why we don’t have a whole bunch of expats here in XVI.  The call center industry is still very young.  We have very talented, energetic and ambitious people in the workforce who are working their way through the ranks; what they need is nurturing, coaching, and mentoring and developing into bigger and better things.  It’s a delicate balance, having the right people here to provide that mentorship and having too many people here that represent the expat ceiling.  I don’t want our local resources to look up and say, “I can’t aspire to that position because that position can only be held by an expat.” 

We have two expats here in the entire center, myself and one of my directors for operations.  We have QA and operations people (from overseas) come in and out to help us out occasionally in defining processes and coming up with better practices. Sometimes they like what we’re doing and  take it back and apply it back to the US.  It’s a two-way street.

What are the challenges you face?

For me, the biggest challenge is to get out of the everyday operations and being actively involved in analyzing what is happening and to move forward to setting us up strategically to be successful and grow.  Setting up the right people, strategies, and systems in place.  Our executives work through the organization.  Our owners are very much involved with our plans, and can watch at any time the programs and can comment on the numbers. 

What’s your management style?

I require for myself to have leadership that inspires me.  I am looking for my bosses to be people whom I have faith in their management, their vision, where we’re going and the ethical standards with which they carry their business.  It’s very important to me.  I look for that leadership and if I find it, I am happy to get alongside them and paddle along stream with them and grow with the company. 

I also feel very strongly that I should represent that same level of leadership to everyone who works for me, and they should represent that same vision to everyone all the way through the organization.

Our agents should be able to look at our team leaders and say, “That is somebody I aspire to be like.  I like the way I am treated, the way they do business, the way they lead me to success, and I respect them.”  It’s  nice to be liked, it’s more important to be respected.  I like to do business with a smile on my face, but none of my people will mistake my congeniality as a sign of weakness.

 It’s much nicer if we can do things on a cooperative agreement. I  have a policy where I am happy to listen to everyone’s input,  then  once we’ve agreed on where we’re going, we put our best efforts on getting us there. I don’t want anybody on  the sidelines saying, “I don’t agree with this.  I don’t think it will work.”  That’s not the way we do business here.

We want to become an organization where everyone cares about the company, their customers, and their colleagues. I want these people who come to work to look forward in coming to work.  I want them to say, “I don’t want to mess my day today because something interesting might happen.”

I look at some call centers here who have grown dramatically.  Of course, we want to get bigger but by being the best and not just by putting numbers and bodies.  We have an exceptional portfolio of clients.  We developed relationships with them, partnerships in the true sense of the word.  You are a partner with the client if you are honest in what you can deliver. We are very flexible  with our client’s needs, but we are going to be very honest with them about what is realistically attainable, and help them set expectations.

How have you been doing so far?

We just opened our second call center in Manila, in Quezon City.  On ESDA, another 1,000-seat call center.  We have another 1,000-seat call center in RCBC.  We are looking to open another center probably by the end of the year, but we are still discussing where that still might be.  Obviously, preferences would be where there is a good resource port, and where there is not as much competition as there is currently in Makati (laughs).

It is a little easier to recruit in Quezon City because there’s not that much competition.  What we can draw there is largely residential and there are good universities in that area.  We are looking for our next location to give us that similar edge.  Most of our programs are ramping very vigorously now.

What would you say is your strength?

We are very accessible and very flexible.  When our client’s business changes, we look to see what we can do to change with them and help them with that change.  We are a mid-sized company that can react quickly because of the closeness of our management to what’s going on.  It doesn’t take long to make a decision.  We can come back with solutions. 

On the other side of the coin, most companies here in the Philippines are marketing to the US, Europe, a little bit of Australia, the rest of the world.  But the marketing that we do as an organization here in the Philippines is not so much to potential clients but to potential employees. 

We make them understand who we are, what we represent, and what we represent in terms of career path. A lot of agents come to us because they have friends and colleagues who tell them to see what we have.  I walk down through recruiting and often see  who we call homing pigeons, people who left us months ago because they thought that the grass was greener somewhere else---and then  realize what they had here, the culture, the environment, the things that we try to do here, is valuable.

We have a responsibility to ensure that the young people who come to us are benefiting from the experience.   I don’t mean more money so they can buy better cell phones although that’s a part of it---obviously you want your quality of life to improve.  But we want them growing in terms of their knowledge.  There are many opportunities here: financial services, customer service, technical services, where they can learn skills like negotiation skills or sharpen their English skills. 

They earn quite a good income by Philippine standards and some of them have taken that and parlayed it into doing something else.  They develop themselves into something aside from just being a resource for someone else’s business.

I want all of them to think outside of doing a job, getting paid, and spending the money.

What is the biggest challenge in your industry and how do you meet it?

I think the biggest challenge is competition for resources, frankly.  The industry has grown.  In the early years in the Philippines, agents read the script and took orders; it didn’t require creative use of the language.  As the industry develops, clients have become far more demanding of the resource; they are looking for conversational, consultative exchanges through the agents. 

The agents need to listen better.  They need to understand the client’s issues, and  synthesize solutions from what they have in their tool bag to understand the client’s problems and fix them. The requirement for understanding in English has gone up.  Every month, every week, every year,  the industry and their demand on the resources grows.

I don’t think that the schools’ attention to English has met that challenge yet.  The  government is certainly aware of it.  They are making the right noises that we need to be improving. I am married to a Filipina and I have two stepchildren who are teenagers in high school.  The  English of the first one is not so strong so we put him in a public high school in Makati High; it’s a very good school and we are impressed. His English is improving, but mostly because he’s around me.  The other one’s  English is a little bit stronger, we put him in St. Mary of the Woods, a private school in Makati, the other side of Osmena Highway.  They teach English, and his English is growing dramatically.

Most of my good agents were educated in private schools and taught English in the high school level.  By the time they arrived in college, they had strong English skills.  Speaking English in the call centers is incredibly important because it is the tool we bring to work.  If we were lumberjacks, we would keep our axes sharp as we possibly could so we could cut as many trees as we could as efficiently as possible.  English is the tool that we bring to work; it’s what the agents bring to work everyday.   The only method that they can make the client understand the solution that they are providing, understand the product they are selling to them, is the picture they are able to paint in the words they use.  Honing that skill is something that has to be constant. 

In call centers, there is the tendency to slip into Tagalog when people are being coached. We are working very hard to make this an English environment because that’s the only way we can help our agents improve their communication and conversational skills so that they can be the very best resource that they can be once they get on the floor and talk to a largely English-speaking clientele.

I understand the Filipinos’ cultural needs to be very firm in their roots and understand where they’re from and I am completely supportive of that.  But in order to be successful in this industry, the tool that they bring to work is their English and we have to help right at the education level, from the very start.  So by the time that they arrive in the job market, their English skills are stronger than they are now.One wonderful thing about the Filipino work force is not only are they great entertainers, they are great mimics.  You’d never know that my agents are not from the mid-West.  Even if there is a Filipino accent there, they are providing solutions efficiently to the client. That’s an advantage that we in the Philippines have over the call centers in India where people are listening more to the accent than they are listening to what is being said.

What is your fulfillment?

I am a teacher. When people say, “I didn’t get it before, I get it now,” any time that I can get them to understand something that they didn’t understand before, that is very fulfilling for me.  To put themselves in a position where they can grow, that is a huge achievement for me.   I am very comfortable talking to the facilities people about their struggles as I am talking to the executives in the board room. 

I am very proud to be the person who steers the ship at XVI Philippines.  I remain acutely aware of the fact that my hand is on the wheel, but the people on the seats with the headsets on, they are the engine room who get us where we are going.  Every single one of us who is not on that floor talking to the client need to be focused on helping them help the client more efficiently.  Everyone in QA, IT, facilities, needs to know that the agents are our customers.  We make our business better by making them more efficient than they are.

I have always been an adventurer.  I have always traveled.  When I was 13, I traveled around the Mediterranean.  My first trip abroad was in France when I was 11.  I quickly realized that the world was a big place to see where there are  people to meet.  I love the Philippines and am married to a Filipina.  That has helped me a great deal in understanding the things that around me.  My wife will explain to me why things are the way they are. 

I’ve always been driven.  I enjoy being successful and taking people with and around me from where we are to where we are going and beyond.  I take that responsibility very seriously.  I give them the tools and machinery to deliver for the clients’ satisfactions successfully.My motivation is to lead the people that I am responsible for to be successful.  At the same time, my management is very supportive in giving me the room and the tools to get the job done.  That keeps me motivated in taking what we have and being the very best that we can.  Our mantra here is, “I want to be the very best that I can be every single day.”

What’s a day in your life like?

It very often starts at 9:30 pm.  I tend to do East Coast time because that’ s the lion share of the clients.  I remain here until mid-day, dealing with some of the issues that arise locally. 

Sometimes, I end up climbing down the ladder and digging into the ditch, picking up the shovel, and working with the operations people.   It can be a bit of a rollercoaster through the day, working with clients on what they need, and planning with our executive management.

How do you keep your company competitive?

We are putting into place a performance assessment program, a scorecard for every employee in the company, which lets  them know if they are meeting their goals.

We are focused right now on reports, their standardization and automation. As much as possible, we take out human intervention in the production reports to  get more accurate client reports.  I’d like for us to have  a client phasing report portal where the client can just log in and get the reports for their program. 

Two of our major clients have people here who work with us full-time in Client Relationship management as a conduit for information to and from the client

Who is Mr. Azucena outside the office?

A very simple, ordinary person who loves eating and going to malls with my family. I prefer wearing jeans and a comfortable t-shirt for strolling.

How do you relax?

I love my family. I like to scuba-dive.  I play golf when I have time.  In the Philippines, I love some of the food and live entertainment.  I think the quality of some of the bars in Manila is exceptional. Music is one my loves, I play the guitar and sing a little.  I love any sport that you can watch.  I love the sunshine, and I enjoy company. 

People find it very difficult to guess my age.  I think working in a call center keeps you young, as it keeps you around a very young group.  I don’t want to be like some people my age walking along stooped down;  I will continue to walk with a spring on my step and a smile on my face.  The organization is a reflection of you.

If someone were to ask you how he can be successful, what would your advice be?

Some archetypes are strong in the Philippines; one of them is putting expats on the pedestal.  They see these people as coming from the big leagues and hang on to every word.  That’s wonderful from a training perspective, to see a bunch of 30 bright faces poised to write down every word.  But as you move up the organization, you have to develop the strength of character that is based on your knowledge of what needs to be done and based on your knowledge of the business.

Too many foreigners come in, and people put themselves in a conciliatory position, accepting  that what the foreigner says is right.  One thing I do is give them faith in their knowledge and their own abilities enough to take a position and defend it.  It’s not being arguing or being difficult, but about not being steamrolled.   Some good resources allow themselves to be steamrolled because they don’t have the confidence to say, “Thank you for telling me but I think I am right, and this is why.”  You very rarely hear that from young people in the Philippines.

My advice is: know your product, your position, your company well enough to defend your position. 

No matter how old or how well educated these resources are, there is still a strong tendency in the Philippines to take  what they are told without questioning or offering a counterpoint to what is being offered.

I tell my team that if they see me in the hall and that I’m out of step---they should  tell me.  To tell me something I have not considered.  That’s the point of having people who are smart and strong in their environment.  To make you consider what you hadn’t before.

Developing that sense of knowing how and when to put their input and having the strength and confidence to do that.  That’s very necessary for them to grow. 

I have people I want to move from operations level to director level; I have to show that these people can stand up to the client on the executive level, give a presentation, talk intelligently about the numbers, and defend why things are the way they are.  It’s not a question of stacking the numbers but knowing what you’re doing and discussing them on an equal level with anybody, be they foreign, executive, or your colleague in the next room. 

That’s the challenge we need to do for the Filipino workforce. You can’t take as gospel everything that you are told.  You have to learn to question it, understand it, and then go forward in the strength of knowledge.  I think we do a good job here of encouraging that level of confidence in people.