Key Takeaways
- Neil Fernandez manages 105 agents across 40 accounts at Callnovo’s Bolivia site — ranging from 30-agent programs to single shared agents — and has been doing customer service work for 35 years, with his 10-year Callnovo anniversary hitting this February.
- The COVID pandemic was actually a talent injection for the Bolivia BPO operation — tourism workers, teachers, and language professionals who lost their jobs joined Callnovo, and 40% of them are still with the company today.
- The biggest client pain point isn’t service quality — it’s response time promises that clients themselves don’t keep — when clients tell agents to promise 24–48 hour resolution but don’t deliver on their end, customers call back angrier and agents take the heat.
- The best agents aren’t the ones with perfect English — they’re the ones with deep product knowledge and the ability to go straight to the point — “You don’t need to speak that much. You just know what you need to say.”
Meet Neil Fernandez
Neil Fernandez has been in customer service since he was twenty years old. He’s now fifty-five. That’s thirty-five years of talking to customers, managing agents, and solving problems that nobody warned him about when he started.
Before Callnovo, Neil worked at Harrah’s Casino in the United States and JP Morgan Chase. He spent seven years at a company handling fabric industry customer service. He joined Callnovo in February 2016 — and this month marks his ten-year anniversary.
Manny: Oh, it’s ten years anniversary. Wow. It’s a long time.
Neil: Yeah. Fourteen, fifteen of February.
He’s been an operations manager since 2019. When he started, he shared 30 agents with another manager. Today, the Bolivia site has grown to 550 employees handling exclusively international accounts, and Neil personally manages 105 agents across roughly 40 accounts.
Those 40 accounts aren’t uniform. Some have 30 agents. Some have 20. Some have 7. Some are individual agents. And then there are the shared accounts — agents handling four, five, sometimes seven different clients. Neil is the only operations manager at the Bolivia site who handles shared accounts.
A Day That Never Really Ends
Manny: So on a daily basis, your daily work, what’s the biggest challenge?
Neil: Well, the biggest challenge — it’s be sure that the operations are working normally and that there’s not going to be people calling out. Not having issues with the internet service. Be sure that all the equipment is working normally. Be sure that everybody’s on time. Computers, headsets, mouse, keyboards — everything is working in order. And that’s the first step.
Neil starts at 7 AM. His agents mostly come in at 9 or 10. He uses that early window to answer all the messages that accumulated overnight from CSMs and clients in different time zones — messages that arrive at midnight, 1 AM, 3 AM.
Neil: I see the messages, but since you’re just waking up or trying to be awake, probably you could get confused and provide a certain kind of answer. And instead of having a little problem, you could have a bigger problem. So I’d rather get here early in the morning with a clear mind.
His shift officially ends at 4 PM. But at 6:30 PM, he reconnects to run reports and inform CSMs about the day’s events. He stays connected until 9 or 10 PM. One account runs until 1 AM — he has a team leader covering that one.
And then there are the messaging apps.
Neil: I handle personally like five different applications — DingTalk, WeChat, Lark, Teams, WhatsApp. So with that, you’re talking about five different applications. Sometimes at the end of the day, I have like sixty-six messages on each one of them.
That’s roughly 330 messages across five platforms, every single day.
The Pandemic Nobody Expected to Help
Manny: How did the pandemic treat you?
Neil: Although it was a difficult time for the world in general, it actually gave us a really good push. Most of the tourism agencies, teachers, and different kinds of people related to languages — they came to work with us because we had the opportunity to provide a job and they had the opportunity to work from home.
The pandemic devastated Bolivia’s tourism and education sectors. But it created an unexpected talent pipeline for BPO work. People with strong language skills, customer-facing experience, and professional discipline suddenly needed jobs — and Callnovo could offer remote work when most employers couldn’t.
Neil: I could tell you like forty percent of all the people that started at that time, they continue with us.
Manny: So that’s actually an increase of the talent pool quality and quantity.
Neil: Correct. Everybody has the idea that it was a really bad time, but in our business it actually represented an increase.
When the Power Goes Out
Manny: What was the worst thing that happened to you recently?
Neil: It was actually the thirtieth of January. Ten of my agents were working and somehow we got a power outage only on their area. There was no solution, so I had to grab ten of my agents and take them to another place in order for them to set up, put all the computers on, and connect again. And that took like almost one hour.
Manny: Oh, that was quick. One hour downtime.
But the real story isn’t the logistics. It’s how the agents responded.
Neil: I spoke with the agents and told them — the clients are not going to understand that we had a power outage specifically in your area. Do you want to take these hours like it was your lunch? I’ll pay you one extra hour from our pocket in order to keep the service on.
Eight of the ten agents hadn’t taken lunch yet. Their response:
No, I'm gonna keep working. I don't have a problem. I know it's difficult to explain this, and I'm gonna keep working. I just don't want to affect the account.
Callnovo agent, Bolivia delivery center
The entire incident — discovery, diagnosis, physical relocation of 10 workstations, reconnection, and resumption of service — was resolved in one hour. The client never knew it happened.
The Pain Point Nobody Talks About
When Manny asked Neil what advice he’d give to clients, the answer wasn’t about technology or pricing. It was about keeping promises.
Neil: Basically, the answer time. We usually tell the customers it’s going to take twenty-four to forty-eight hours for us to provide a solution. But the clients need to accomplish that time. They tell us to promise twenty-four to forty-eight hours, and that’s what we do — but they need to make sure they’re going to accomplish it.
Manny: So do clients keep the promise?
Neil: They keep the promise about the refund or the replacement. What’s not being accomplished is the time.
Neil described a case from that morning: a customer needed a product replacement. He was asked to send photos and videos of the defective product. He did — in his first email. By the time Neil saw the case, the customer had received six identical templated emails asking for the same photos and videos.
Neil: This is the sixth email requesting the same thing. “Please send us the video and the pictures.” The client has a department that handles the emails and they are the ones sending the templates.
The result: Neil or his assistant have to personally get on calls as supervisors with upset customers, promising to accelerate a process they don’t fully control.
Neil: You have to talk with the same customer as supervisor like two or three times before it gets solved. That twenty or thirty percent of repeat escalations — it could mean a really bad review or a complaint that could affect the business for the client.
What Makes a Great Agent
Manny: Who is your best agent? You don’t have to name them — just describe the quality.
Neil: The best agent is the one that’s always looking for the information, getting updated about the new information of the product. Always prepared. Has a capacity to answer at least ninety percent of the questions that customers could have. Even if it’s not a native English accent — if he’s really bright and well prepared and always updated, that person could handle everything.
Manny: So it’s not just language — it’s logical thinking, comprehension, and clarity.
Neil: Yes. You don’t need to speak that much. You just know what you need to say.
You don't need to speak that much. You just know what you need to say. Go straight to the point. Most of the time, customers are looking for the answer to the problem. You could solve it in a four-minute call without the necessity to explain too much.
Neil Fernandez, Operations Manager, Callnovo Bolivia
Neil also pointed out the hiring challenge: nobody studies to work in a call center. There’s no college major for it. Finding agents who combine language ability, the right personality, and the capacity to learn complex products quickly is the real difficulty.
Neil: You could speak really good English, but if you don’t have the personality or the preparation, the English alone is not going to help you out. And you could have a great person who’s able to communicate with everyone, but if they have issues with the language, that’s another problem. We need to get to the middle.
HeroDash vs. The Rest
Neil manages accounts that use both Callnovo’s in-house platform (HeroDash) and client-provided tools like Zendesk, Udesk, Five9, and others.
Manny: For a new client with no system — would you rather use Zendesk or HeroDash?
Neil: Depending on the number of agents, I would rather have HeroDash right now. The top reasons — it’s friendly, useful. The agents have the option to handle everything at once. It seems more clear than Zendesk, because Zendesk customizes everything according to the client. HeroDash is simpler — you just find the options for calls, chats, emails, screenshot monitoring, timesheets. And from the manager point of view, how you can jump into the dashboard and see battery calls, tardiness — all on one page.
For larger accounts, Neil acknowledged that established platforms like Zendesk work well — particularly when clients are already invested in them. But for smaller accounts and new implementations, the all-in-one simplicity of HeroDash wins.
Neil: For the smaller accounts, the HeroDash system is working a lot better now than it was in the beginning.
When AI Gets It Wrong
Neil shared a story about an AI-powered quality assurance alert that flagged one of his agents for getting a customer upset.
Neil: One of the CSMs called me and complained about the agent getting a customer upset and getting a really bad QA review. So I listened to the call.
The call was in Spanish. The customer — a Puerto Rican man — called about car parts. He spoke fast and loud, as is natural. Midway through, he handed the phone to his mechanic, who was even louder and faster. Neither was upset. The call ended well — the agent arranged to send parts quickly.
Neil: But the AI system, because of the tone of voice, and it couldn’t recognize the different tones between the two people — it sent a report saying the agent got the customer upset and the customer was yelling.
The system assumed two speakers: agent and customer. There were actually three. The AI couldn’t distinguish between an angry customer and a loud Caribbean mechanic speaking rapid-fire Spanish.
Manny: In your case, there are three speakers. The logic is against the pre-assumption when QA is done by AI. So it’s confused.
Neil: Correct. If I wouldn’t have listened to the call and noticed it was Spanish and there were two different people, we wouldn’t have realized.
The Toilet Paper on the Desk
Near the end of the interview, Manny noticed something in the background of Neil’s video feed.
Manny: There’s a piece of toilet paper behind you.
Neil: That’s because of the crying today, really. Believe it or not, that’s one important piece of the job here in the call center.
He wasn’t entirely joking. Agents cry. The work gets to people. And when they need tissue — for tears, for frustration, for whatever — they come to Neil.
Neil: It is kind of frustrating once in a while because you try to help the customers in the best way that you can. But it’s difficult to provide the same answer twice or three times — “we’re going to do everything we can” — and the customer says, “you told me the same thing yesterday and the day before yesterday.”
Manny: It can be a dreadful job.
Neil: It is. Whenever I go home, I don’t want to speak to anybody because I talk with people the whole day. Sometimes you treasure your time alone.
That’s the part of BPO operations that doesn’t make it into pitch decks or service agreements. The emotional weight of being the person between a frustrated customer and a client who hasn’t delivered. Doing it across 40 accounts. For fifteen hours a day. For thirty-five years.
And still showing up at 7 AM with a clear mind, ready to answer 330 messages.
What This Means for Clients
When you outsource customer service, you’re not just hiring agents. You’re relying on people like Neil — managers who have spent decades learning how to keep operations running through power outages, platform limitations, and the daily emotional grind of frontline service.
The best BPO relationships aren’t the ones where the client forgets the outsourcer exists. They’re the ones where both sides understand that customer service is a shared system — and that the Neil Fernandezes of the world can only deliver if the promises they’re asked to make are promises the client keeps too.