The Construct

I’ve had the unpleasant business of calling up call centers regarding two of my accounts – one’s with a bank and the other, about a subscribed service. I never really thought about it much before but call center agents have quite the access to our personal information.

For example, with the bank – all you need is to provide them with your name and account details and they can pull out your record and see everything pertinent about the account – all the personal information on the application sheet, your credit, your transaction history, etc… Heck even food delivery services have quite the database on them, right. Just give the guy your phone number and everything else is logged – name, address, landmarks, and even a brief physical description of it.

With the rise of identity theft nowadays, how safe is our information at the hands of these call center agents? What does it take to get access to accounts anyway? An answer to a security check simple question like “What’s you mother’s maiden name”? If these agents have such an easy access to our data, it’s just a matter of time when some enterprising bastard does something with them and gets away it.

I just wonder what measures companies are taking to protect out information.

Let’s face it, gone are the days that Filipinos are known to have above-par English language skills to be more competitive than our Asian neighbors. Just observe how the Koreans are leeching us of our English in exchange for Php100 an hour. Still, we’re lucky enough to be a BPO hub.

And Inquirer.net reports that we’ll have a shortage of BPO workers despite the numerous graduates we churn out each year. So what does a college degree mean nowadays. Curse those diploma mills and substandard education.

(more…)

Thanks to J. Angelo for his insight regarding my previous post.

It is quite true that one of the problems that Philippine-based call centers face is the crop of young graduates who are really capable of communicating with customers.

As M.A.K. Halliday has proposed in his Systemic-Functional Linguistics, communication always has a context. This can simply be illustrated by the word “mouse.” This word can easily change its meaning if used between pest exterminators and between computer geeks.

(more…)

I do not quite know how to take a position on the quality of English language speakers here in the Philippines. One of my professors have always posed that question during and after classes. He has this observation that Filipino English speakers nowadays have better pronunciation than speakers a generation ago. So that would be Generation Xers, Yers, and the Net Gen versus the older ones. Now, are we?

(more…)