Globe Telecom: Embracing the Visayan culture

Last Wednesday, Globe Telecom held a presscon in Radisson Blu to launch its 1st Trilingual Customer service. Globe Telecom’s top officialdom led by President Ernest Cu, Peter Bithos, senior adviser for Consumer Business, Joe Caliro, head of Customer Experience and Globe’s IT partner Mr. Bong Borja, CEO of Aegis People’s Support were all there with Ms. Yoly Crisanto, head, Corporate Communications of Globe emceeing the event.

We’ve attended many Globe presscons in the past, but the presscon last Wednesday was truly different in the sense that it was the first time in Philippine telecommunication history that a telco was having a trilingual customer service using a Cebu-based contact center dedicated for Visayan speaking customers. There was no doubt in my mind that Globe Telecom is targeting those people who still don’t have cellphones simply because many of them don’t speak English, but only the Visayan language. Mind you, it targets not only the Visayas, but a huge chunk of Mindanao as well.

This new customer service reminded me of the advertisements of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited (HSBC) a couple of years ago, which showed the various cultural differences between national language, making all government communication in Pilipino. That act triggered a court case filed by then Cebu Governor Emilio “Lito” Osmeña and he won that case.

Today, President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino goes around the country speaking in Tagalog without realizing that not all Filipinos are Tagalog speakers. When will P-noy realize that our government is not the Republika ng Katagalugan? Jacobinism has since been replaced by the United Nations Human Rights Declaration, whereby, indigenous speakers have the right not only to speak their own native languages but also the right to be educated in their native tongues. If you didn’t know, the Philippines is a signatory to that UN declaration and our language policies contradict the UN declaration. Until this day the error persists.

Since the UN declaration was signed, Canada almost split when the Quebecers wanted to have a separate French speaking country. Czechoslovakia in 1983 split up to become the Czech Republic and Slovakia. When the Iron Curtain fell in 1990, Yugoslavia broke into pieces through ethnic lines and turned into several independent countries namely, Croatia, Macedonia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Serbia with two autonomous provinces within Serbia called Kosovo and Vojvodina. Lately, Scotland wants to be independent from the United Kingdom. Who’s next?

During the Q&A, I literally gave a