Mailene Dumajel – Virtual Assistant

Hello! My name is Mailene Dumajel. I’ve worked in the BPO industry from 2007 up to 2017 and started my home-based career in 2017 up to present.

Being the 3rd in a family of 10, I had to start working at 16 years of age while going to college to support myself. Eventually I had to stop going to school when my mum died and I had to help my 7 younger siblings.

It was hard to find a job that paid well when you’re an undergraduate so, when I got a scholarship for call centre training, I worked hard to learn and gain skills.

In 2007 I finally landed a job in the BPO industry away from home. It was hard being away from my family for the first time, but it was so fulfilling because my experiences helped me gain more and more skills while being paid higher than the average local worker in our community.

From being part of the service crew at a fast-food chain, I became tech support, handling customers who were struggling with their internet connection and helped my client’s customer in fixing hardware issues with their HP laptops. Since then, I’ve been exposed to other admin tasks related to customer service via phone, email, and chat – and then later on lead a team of customer support representatives and also became a Quality Analyst.

I got married in 2012 and started raising my little family and everything changed. I needed to bring my kids to the office when they were sick or when no one was available to look after them. I prayed to God to help me find a way to earn while taking care of my kids at home and luckily, I found Syntax and my prayers about working while looking after them were answered.

My experience in working from home had helped me gain more skills such as handling social media accounts, communicating with clients via phone and email, booking restaurants or a place for my client’s team meeting, or events while joining them remotely. Regularly sending out a survey for the entire team and to clients, and creating reports based on the survey results. I also helped my clients in preparing payroll, and gathering documents from employees and uploading them on the CRM. Helping them with any kind of research and project management tasks were part of the daily tasks.

After meeting and working for several clients and team members, I realised that the right attitude is more important than having the skills. You can train someone to master a certain skill but you can never teach anyone the right attitude and I believe that’s more important than hiring someone who knows everything.

When I started working in the BPO industry, I didn’t know how to turn the computer on, but I was hired as tech support and assisted elderly people on how to set up their computer to be able to connect to the internet wired and wireless, troubleshoot laptop issues, and a lot more.

I remembered giving up a lot of sleeping hours and rest days just to watch over my teammates and learn from them so I could learn the process even though I knew little about computers.

I also realised that after having different kinds of roles that what I enjoy most is when I can help other people. It might be a challenging task but at the end of the day, when you know that you were able to help someone, it makes a lot of difference and I feel fulfilled…

So, I am looking for a job where I can extend my help in any ways that would make me feel useful and valued at work.

If you need help with your business, please feel free to reach out.

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