• VA Profile -- Edsel Carcedo




    Writing Sample >>> The following is an unedited writing sample. This will help you to better understand Edsel's background, while also demonstrating his writing skills...


    “My career in the BPO industry started way back 2004 after I returned from Canada. The reason why I returned is a completely different story reserved for another time.

    The very first company I worked with was PeopleSupport Philippines Incorporated. I started out with a travel account as a customer service rep. It was intimidating, I admit, at first. After about 3 years of being a customer service rep and being pulled out once in a while to serve as an SME to newbies, I was accepted to a QA position with one of the technical accounts in PeopleSupport. The account was Apple, which after almost a year of operations decided to withdraw. That was rather anticlimactic. I was hoping to rise up to a senior position to be honest.

    After a few months of bumming around I decided to go back to work with ePerformax. Since I was already QA in my previous company, I applied for the same position and got accepted. I was one of the pioneers for the account, eBay. After a few weeks of writing up evaluations for the agents under my span of management, I was promoted to a Team Lead position. ePerformax employed an unorthodox type of leadership since besides the TL, there was also a coach. The former, my position, handled the attendance, escalations and the like. The coach handled the agent performance on the floor much like the QA. It was a rather enlightening experience for me since most agents are not very keen on keeping a good record on their attendance no matter how I convince them of the perks they can receive and the consequences if they didn’t. I guess the leadership at the time liked my performance since I was given more than 30 heads to handle instead of the normal 12 to 15 heads. That also lead to my decision of looking for other opportunities since the stress level of handling more than 3 different teams spread across all 3 shift schedules was no easy feat. My attrition rate was rather higher than most and I felt guilty over the agents who got terminated for attendance issues that I have not even met formally. That got me jaded when it comes to leadership positions.

    The next company I worked with after a few months of recuperating from my sad experience was WIPRO. I wasn’t looking for a leadership position then, they also had no opening as another. I got accepted as a customer service rep, again, reminiscent of my time in PeopleSupport. I was like a man in a mission to rise to the top. I was in the position of customer service for about 6 months when my TL saw my resume somehow and endorsed me to a back office position. I’ve never had the experience but she said it suited me well since being in a customer service rep position was not plain challenging anymore for someone with my history. That was the beginning of the position that I would hold for the next 9 to 10 years of my life. It was challenging, since we had to start from scratch, there was refinement of the process along the way, made several changes to how the process would be recognized by the client as important and essential. The process became so refined that instead of being handled by a team of 5, it was reduced to 1, the single agent being me. There were other queues of the same nature, also back office which also underwent the same process and we were grouped into a single team. Several team leads have had the pleasure of handling us, all of them promoted to managerial positions. Eventually there came a time when the promotion of the TL that handled us was too abrupt that I was installed as the OIC for the entire team. I then told myself, here we go again. The OM at the time pushed me to continue on as a TL but I never did. Eventually I applied for another opportunity with another company. You might say the OIC position reminded me of days long ago when I had to quit my first TL position.

    I got accepted with TIPI. This was Telstra. One of the case managers. Hardened to handle the most difficult cases on the floor. Anything that cannot be handled by the frontliners, agents on phone, was passed on to us a case. The training was rigid and short. The software we used was very broad that it handled almost everything for every product Telstra had. It took a few months before a mastery of the so called tip of the iceberg for the software was even conceivable. Questions were hurled like leaves blown in a mini hurricane. People were not getting answers on their own most of the time, thank God for SMEs. Then the big announcement came while we were quietly working from home. The Cebu site was to be closed. We received remunerations for our brief stay with the company of course. I tried hard in looking for a permanent work from home arrangement since the current pandemic gave me the scare of a lifetime, going out to travel to get to work was not an option anymore, at least for me, a breadwinner for a family of four."