Mercedes Ortega – Virtual Assistant, ESL Teacher

Hi, I am Mercedes Ortega, you can call me Ched. I am a mother to a lovely daughter. I am a Bachelor’s in Education graduate from Pangasinan State University. I am a teacher by profession but the pandemic made me transition to become a virtual assistant. I took up formal Freelancing and Virtual Assistance Training. I later on worked as an Intern VA at Yoloop SL located in Madrid Spain for 5 months where I did numerous tasks such as Transcription, Email Management and Social Media Management (SMM), which gave way for me to get my first ever client as an administrative assistant. I help him by managing his email, calendar, appointments, making travel arrangements, and other ad hoc tasks.

My professional journey started out as a Counter Sales Personnel at Goodyear where my administrative, communication and customer service skills were honed and developed. In this role, I had the privilege of interacting with a diverse group of individuals, ensuring smooth and efficient Assistance to customers with purchase decisions, greeting customers, attending to clients’ complaints, keeping track of inventories, establishing trust relationships with customers, and maintaining client records.

After a year of working as a sales personnel, I decided to pursue my first love which is teaching – I spent 10 years practising my profession in moulding the young generations.

Aside from my years of teaching experience, I also have over a year of professional experience as a Customer Service Representative in the BPO Industry. I experienced dealing with different customers who are angry, frustrated, worried and afraid. I’ve demonstrated success in responding to customer’s telephone, email and chat queries in an accurate and timely manner. Not just that, I always make sure that I address all of the customer’s concerns without lacking empathy. I remember my job in a BPO company, the first line of technical support. Many people who called us lacked any technical knowledge, and could not even describe the problem they experienced. I always stayed patient, and with the help of targeted questions–asking them about different lights and signals on their devices, explaining everything clearly, and helping them to identify the problem. The client was so happy that he asked for my personal contact details, but company policy is that we aren’t allowed to give out our contact information. He said he wanted to send a gift to me.

When the pandemic happened, I transitioned to becoming a VA. I never thought working remotely was possible until I became one. Working at home was the best thing that happened to me during that time. I got to spend a lot of time with my growing daughter, witnessed all her milestones and developed a very close relationship with each other.

For a copy of Mercedes’ resume please click here.