Not all call centers and business process outsourcing companies are alike.

While some promote products and services, one type is about people trying to assist others.

The Davao-based company, Six Eleven Global Services, and Solutions lives up to its name of fixing problems and helping customers.

In the early Aughts, or the era 2000 to 2009, the JIB e-Academy, a training school for call center agents, had no place to field its graduates since there were only two call centers in the Davao region.

Enterprising educator Jojie Ilagan Bian or JIB, who established several schools in Mindanao, and her family opened a call center to give jobs to its graduates and boost the Davao economy.

Hence the graduates no longer had to look for work in the Visayas or Luzon.

In 2005, the educator’s second child, Michael Bian was tasked to be CEO of a modest workforce of 20 agents at the then-start-up Six Eleven. Its name was derived from its opening day on 6 June.

After graduating with a degree in Humanities at the University of the Asia Pacific, the younger Bian realized that the study at its heart focuses on human nature. Humanities taught him to understand the nuances of society and to think out of the box.  It helped him build a business that puts people first, work with clients from other cultures and steer through challenges by understanding what is important to people.

After 18 years, Six Eleven now has 2,500 agents, 95 percent of whom are homegrown talents. The company is aiming to fill up 5,000 seats by 2025.

The competitive salaries is not the only reason for people wanting to work at  Six Eleven. Employees are more productive in its pleasant, well-appointed environment with spaces for relaxation and recreation. Beyond work, the employees engage in family days, wellness activities, and team-building programs.  The management keeps the communication line open with the employees, hence, the low turnover.

Adaptation time

Bian said the company gives them time to adapt to the working conditions instead of putting them under time pressure to perform.

The agents likewise enjoy the wide communities of their clients where they learn new things in a different cultural context.

Technological innovations are progressively blurring the lines between call centers, which specialize in telecommunications customer support, and business process outsourcing, which handles back-end work and processing data, annotating, and tagging. Six Eleven is adept at both.