Arianne Balamban Martin – CSR and Online English Teacher

My name is Arianne Balamban Martin. You can call me Yhan or simply Arianne, pronounced as Air-yenn. I really don’t like my name because pronounce it wrongly as Arrr-yan. It’s quite irritating.

I am not really into writing about myself but anyway, here it is.

I was born with my mum and grandmother. A year later my sister was born. We lived in a province and were raised by our mother on her own. I learned to do farming since my mother is a farmer – even today. Our life was so hard that we needed to work together in order for us to eat every day. With this kind of life, I yearned to be independent, like try to work in a city and at least help my mother with my allowance.

So, when I was in college, I started to work as part of a service crew for 11 months. I was 19 years old at that time. This was my first job and it was so challenging because I worked and at the same time, studied. There was a time that I was really having a hard time so I stopped studying.

In 2007, I applied as a sales executive and as an office assistant for 1 year and a half. As a sales executive, I had to accompany the manager to introduce our products to schools and students who will possibly use it since the products are of high value. So we traveled from one school to another.

As an office assistant, they assigned me to encode files and data, print files that were needed and I also experienced interviewing applicants for the company. I resigned because of the low salary and high demands.

In the same year 2008, I applied to a BPO Company. I learned a lot, especially on how to deal with people with different attitudes and behaviours. Most of them were from the US and also from the other countries. I was in a financial account and our clients were people who are members of different financial institutions. I had the ability to offer better service and fulfill clients’ needs, and be satisfied with the resolutions given.
We were always receiving a lot of calls, so I handled hundreds of inbound calls per shift, depending on the concerns of the clients since a financial account is so sensitive. I verified transactions with suspected fraud, activated new cards, and reported lost or stolen cards in the database system.

I stayed with the team for longer because the company had given me the chance to continue my study while working. I graduated for the Bachelor of Science in Psychology in the University of the Cordilleras, and got married. Then I decided to resign from my first call center experience because of the management and needed to be present at a long family gathering vacation.

In the other call center that I worked with in 2014, I offered customer service to members in an online shop account. My role was to verify their orders and assist them to where they can follow up their orders or pay for it. I also had the chance to perform chat support to members who were having a hard time with their password for their accounts. However, I resigned after 6 months because I got sick and needed to rest.

In 2016, I decided to start doing home-based jobs which would be better since I could still be with my kid while working at home. I loved it! I had my first home-based job as an online English teacher for Chinese students. But after 6 months I needed to quit because of a very low salary and low number of students. I became so frustrated with it.

After a few days, I worked as Telesales Agent with a good salary – PHP 30,000 a month with commissions and incentives. This was an outbound job calling retired people who will possibly use the cruise line tickets for them to enjoy their vacations. Sadly, I needed to leave and resign because I was about to give birth to my second baby that December of 2016. So it was just three months of work for that home job.

I was not able to go back to work after birth because nobody stayed with us to look after our children so I had no choice but to be just a house worker. I tried to go back to the same job for the telesales position but it did not work well. I needed to resign again because it was so hard for me to take care of my kids while working night-shift with no rest at all. There was also a time when we three all became sick. It was so depressing… tough life.

By that time, I just did some online selling just for me to earn something for our needs as a family. But it was not enough, so I made a decision to work again for home-based. I have got to do this all over again for my family. I have to stand out. And there are so many things to do in order for us to survive, especially now when my 6 year old son is going to school. I thanked my mother for taking care of my 2 year old daughter so I could work again.

With all these experiences, I believe that I am a hardworking, multi-tasked woman, with great interpersonal skills, who can work professionally, and is a good team player. I love challenges, have willingness to be trained in new tasks, and will do my best in any way so that clients will be satisfied.

For a copy of Arianne’s resume please click here.