Teleperformance to handle contact center operations of Pag-IBIG Fund

MANILA, Philippines - Home Development Mutual Fund or the Pag-IBIG Fund will now be outsourcing its contact center operations to Teleperformance to cut costs and focus on its core function of providing home loans to its members.

This came after a ceremonial signing between Pag-IBIG president and CEO Darlene Berberabe and Teleperformance managing director Travis Coates yesterday.

Berberabe said the two-year contract would reduce the HDMF’s contact center costs to just P194 million for two years from the current P377 million.

Moreover, the partnership is expected to enhance Pag-IBIG’s customer service and relations services be it through calls, e-mails, or chat messages.

For example, the fund’s average drop call rate of 34 percent is expected to be decreased to not more than 10 percent in the first six months of the contract, Berberabe said. This should further fall to not higher than five percent subsequently, she added.

A drop call rate measures instances when callers would be disconnected due to technical issues or would hang up the phone as no agents are available to answer their calls.

Berberabe said e-mail queries are also expected to be answered faster with the outsourcing efforts. Teleperformance has been tasked to reply to e-mails within 24 hours of receipt, faster than the current six-day average reply period at Pag-IBIG.

For chat messages, Berberabe said the in-house contact center usually replies within 30 minutes of getting the message but this would be trimmed to just 20 seconds given the contract with Teleperformance.

“We are always looking for ways to give bigger, better, faster benefits to our members and we have done a lot of outsourcing in the last year – our collection, our billing,” Berberabe said.

“We have had tremendous improvements in our service because of such… as we can focus on our core function which is the administration of mortgage financing and the administration of the savings program for our 15.7 million members,” she continued.

Pag-IBIG’s partnership with Teleperformance would be fully-operational by Dec. 14 this year. Teleperformance said there would be about 150 agents focused on the account and about 60 of these came from the in-house contact center of Pag-IBIG.

Berberabe said the fund started its in-house contact center operations in 2006, while talks of outsourcing these came as early 2009.

Tapping Teleperformance would provide members 24/7 access to their Pag-IBIG accounts and to agents answering their questions and complaints on housing and other loans, and their savings with the Fund.