With only five taxicabs around, you’d be lucky to catch one in Dumaguete City. Here, people go places in a tricycle while motorcycles rule the road. For a city measuring 35 square kilometers, this small place, by any standard, still grinds to a halt at noontime to allow everyone to go home for lunch.{{more}}
“I didn’t believe it at first when they said that in Dumaguete, everything is 10 minutes away. But I found out for myself that it’s true,” said Leonel Joseph “LJ” Lising, senior operations manager of SPI CRM, a business process outsourcing company that set up its business here in 2009. “When they say a place is malayo, it’s actually near. A ten-minute drive could take you to the next town,” this young executive from Manila said.
Dumaguete’s smallness is its own charm. On a typical afternoon, one can find several of its European immigrants hobble towards their favorite watering hole among the many establishments that dot the Rizal boulevard, facing the Dumaguete bay and have their favorite fix while watching the world go by.
Small wonder why not a few of SPI’s foreign clients have been heard to ask, “Why Dumaguete? There are only 150,000 people there,” recalled Suzanne Lu-Bascara, SPI Global associate director.
The anxiety is not totally misplaced. SPI Global, after all, is a major player in the BPO industry in the country, with 11,000 employees, not to mention some 3000 more in 24 locations in the United States, Europe, India and Vietnam.
Its Dumaguete operation alone expanded from 313 full time employees in October 2009 to 1100 employees in January 2011. “We’re now the biggest private employer in Negros Oriental doing both voice and non-voice services,” Bascara said.
She said the company makes it a point to bring their foreign clients over to Dumaguete to see the place. “They see that although the City is small, there is a steady manpower pool generated by the four universities and colleges here which produce about 5,000 graduates each year, in contrast to the 500,000 graduates throughout the country,” she said.
Also called a University Town, Dumaguete is home to Silliman University, founded by American missionaries in 1901. The nuns from the order of St. Paul de Chartres arrived in Dumaguete’s shores in 1904 to establish the first campus of St. Paul University in the Philippines. In 1949, a young teacher named Vicente G. Sinco established what is now the non-sectarian Foundation University, the first Filipino University. The Negros Oriental State University was founded in 2004.
For Lising, these universities and seven other colleges play an important part in giving them quality employees. “We get nine or 10 walk-ins every day and we have a success rate of 30-40 percent. In contrast, we may get more applicants in Manila but the success rate is only 10 percent,” he said.
It is when the foreign clients realize this that they know they made the right choice by choosing SPI Global, Bascara said.
Not only do the educational institutions provide the 4000 workers in Dumaguete’s BPO industries today but they have also formed an Information Communication Technology Council to harmonize the skills of their graduates with the demand of the competitive BPO industry.
One of the challenges of the ICT Council, headed by Randy Bandiola of Colegio de Sta. Catalina de Alejandria, is to convince the graduates to stay in Dumaguete. There are more jobs for qualified applicants even as BPOs are estimated to pump in no less than P34 million a month into the economy of Dumaguete City and Negros Oriental in salaries alone.
And that’s not counting the side businesses that the employees support. “Near our site, some houses have been renovated to boarding houses,” Lising said. Several restaurants have also sprouted nearby.
Lising said that while he gets to go home to Manila once a month, he enjoys staying in Dumaguete. “It’s cheaper to be in Dumaguete than in Manila. In Manila, a round trip from one’s house to the office could easily cost P50. Here, it’s P20. So call center agents here have higher take home pay,” he said.
His sentiments are also shared by some support members from Manila and Iloilo, who have decided to make Dumaguete their permanent home.
Another thing Lising likes about Dumaguete is that employees don’t skip work even though they partied the night before. “No wonder Dumaguete had been ranked 10th on the list of Next Wave Cities in the Philippines last year,” he said.
SPI Global started operations in Dumaguete with the merger of two companies–E-PLDT Ventus and SPI Technologies in October 2009. Their non-voice services include publishing and copy editing while they have a call center which handles mostly the needs of Smart Communications, Inc, their sister company.
Bascara said they are proud of the quality of their work, which won them the honor of being named as the number one outsourcing company in the world in 2009, by the Black Book of Outsourcing. This was based on a poll of about 650 respondents from the global publishing community.
May Dizon, SPI Global director for external affairs and corporate communications, said that their company will soon venture into the more lucrative KPO (Knowledge Process Outsourcing) market, which will deal with content solutions, health care and client relationship management.
For starters, Dumaguete will be the site of SPI Global’s pioneering venture in the Billing and Cycle Revenue Management.
“Dumaguete is a showcase,” Dizon said. “We want the others to know that in Dumaguete, we found a good place to grow and expand.”
A typical day at the SPI Global facility in Dumaguete City.
