This Philippine BPO company was one of the top 20 outsourcing firms in the country, operating six contact centers across Metro Manila and Cebu with over 8,500 agents serving 23 international clients across telecommunications, financial services, and retail. The company handled approximately 2.1 million customer interactions per month across voice, chat, and email channels.
Client satisfaction with the BPO's services was declining. Average handle times had increased by 22% over two years as products and services grew more complex, while first-call resolution rates had dropped from 74% to 61%. Three major clients had initiated competitive reviews, and two had already begun transitioning a portion of their volume to competitors. The BPO estimated that losing these accounts would represent approximately USD 28 million in annual revenue.
Agent attrition was another persistent challenge, running at 65% annually — typical for Philippine BPOs but devastating for service quality. New agents required eight weeks of training before reaching acceptable proficiency, and even then they handled calls 40% slower than experienced agents. The BPO's leadership recognized that their traditional labor-arbitrage model was under existential pressure from AI-enabled competitors and needed to transform their value proposition.
Pertama Partners' AI Readiness Audit analyzed three months of interaction data across all channels, including call recordings, chat transcripts, email threads, and customer satisfaction surveys. We identified that 58% of interactions fell into 35 distinct resolution patterns that could be fully or partially automated, while the remaining 42% required genuine human judgment and empathy — the BPO's core strength.
The AI Pilot Program deployed three interconnected systems: an AI-powered agent assist tool that listened to calls in real time and displayed relevant knowledge articles, suggested responses, and compliance reminders on the agent's screen; an intelligent routing engine that matched incoming interactions to the best-suited agent based on issue type, customer profile, and agent expertise; and a quality assurance AI that automatically scored 100% of interactions against client-defined quality parameters, replacing the previous system of sampling only 3% of calls.
The AI Transformation Program scaled these capabilities across all six centers and 23 client programs. Critically, Executive Training helped the BPO's leadership team reposition their value proposition to clients — from cheap labor to AI-augmented expertise. Team Training transformed agents from script-followers into AI-assisted problem solvers, focusing their training on the complex empathy-requiring interactions where humans genuinely outperform automation.
"Pertama Partners did not just give us AI tools — they helped us reimagine what a BPO can be. We no longer compete on cost. We compete on intelligence, and our clients see the difference."— Maria Santos, Chief Executive Officer
Every transformation starts with a conversation. Let's discuss your challenges and opportunities.
Discuss Your Challenge