Investing in Team & Community – with Lovely Gacho of SixEleven BPO

In this week’s episode of the Outsource Accelerator Podcast, Derek catches up again with SixEleven BPO, this time speaking with Lovely Gacho, its Chief Support Officer. 

They discuss SixEleven’s recent growth and activities, its initiatives in learning and training, and keeping up with new technology in the outsourcing world.  

SixEleven BPO

Lovely recounts how SixEleven BPO started. 

“We started as a call center school, [but] we didn’t have any clients. We’ve been training agents to be deployed to multinational call centers.” 

Eventually the leadership realized that they could make further use of their facility and open night accounts to match US times. This led to them setting up their own agent teams. 

“We needed people already for our own company. And since our background was in education, we [would] train people and just stop sending students to other call centers.

And that’s really the birth of the SixEleven call center.” 

Lovely holds a position as the Chief Support Officer, onboarding new clients and making sure their requirements are met. She’s already been with the company for 18 years.

“I climbed the corporate ladder there, started as a trainee, and then agent, and then manager, and now I’m the Chief Support Officer.” 

The company is based in Davao, Philippines, a setting which Lovely finds has been overall advantageous for SixEleven to set itself apart. 

“We stayed away from the big metros, in Manila and Cebu, because of the competition and it’s getting more expensive and the saturation of the talent pool.

[In the South], we’ve had a reputation as the first locally-owned call center, and our management team is 90% homegrown. So we’ve developed that unique value for SixEleven.” 

SixEleven CALLS

This year, SixEleven grew to more than a thousand employees. This feat was paired with an award from the Davao City Chamber of Commerce for being the fastest-growing IT-BPM. 

Additionally, SixEleven was also recognized as part of Outsource Accelerator’s recent batch of winners for the Outsourcing Impact Review 2024. 

The firm received the Silver Award for Community Building. 

Lovely explains how the initiative, SixEleven CALLS, enables outsourcing to give people new opportunities.

“[CALLS] stands for Career Advancement, Leadership, and Livelihood Services.”

She points out how many see outsourcing as “a dead-end career” without realizing the impact it can bring to breadwinners. 

“It actually helps thousands of households to bring food on the table and then also to learn. It’s a constant learning process. 

It bridges the gap of somebody working miles away from you [by] using technology for the better.” 

She credits the OIR for allowing them to see how other organizations shared the benefits of outsourcing.

“We were able to see the other industries that bring back to the communities, doing all these corporate social responsibilities and extending the help received from our employees.” 

Training up a young workforce

Lovely also says that a big part of the outsourcing sector is that it allows many new graduates to enter the workforce straightaway. 

“We have a lot of universities and colleges here, but the job opportunities… sometimes it’s going to be hard for new graduates to really find the job that matches their education, because most of the jobs need experience.” 

SixEleven CALLS also assists here, establishing mentorships that encourage two-way learning.

“It’s an initiative to bridge the gap between the young employees and the tenured ones.

The young ones get to teach the tenured ones about the technology, and the tenured ones can teach the young ones about the value of keeping a job and staying and being engaged.” 

Staying on top of technological changes

Technology is a large component of outsourcing, so SixEleven takes care to keep in step with the current trends. 

Lovely explains that aside from adapting to the tools of their larger clients, they also make recommendations to their smaller clients.

“Since we have the ideas [and] experience, we also suggest new tools for the clients and if it may be helpful for their business.” 

According to her, this fits with the company’s greater mission. 

“It’s part of our learning activities to teach our employees not just the basic call center [processes], but also [the] technology that’s fast evolving.”  

You may visit SixEleven BPO’s website here. Feel free to also get in touch with Lovely at [email protected] or her LinkedIn profile.