Merelyn Gonzales

I am an experienced customer service specialist, self sufficient and highly organized.

I had my first job at 21 as a wedding photographer in Saudi Arabia. My tasks include editing photos using Adobe Photoshop and create wonderful digital photo albums. On occasion, my services will also include video montage and same day edit videos. I was almost always alone working on my projects with minimal supervision which turned out to be for the best, since I became highly independent and self-sufficient. 

When I got home, I decided to join the BPO industry where I started as a customer service representative for a Telco account. I took calls for about a year dealing with different kinds of customers which enhanced my active listening and multitasking skills, solidified my English proficiency, and improved my patience. Part of being an excellent customer service agent is listening to certain queues like how the customer sound, what aren’t they saying, and keeping your cool when they start ranting. 

After a year, I got promoted as a real time analyst which honed my analytical skills. I was tasked of real time monitoring and reporting on a daily basis. I learned how to create reports and dashboards with Excel and google sheets. A year later, I got promoted as a Scheduler/Capacity Planner. I was then exposed to communicating directly with our clients overseas making sure we are rightly staffed to achieve our KPIs. Instead of just generating reports, my responsibilities now include presenting them to operations for our internal sync up, before presenting them to our clients/vendors. 

It was a little over a year before I was asked to apply for a team leader position to prepare me for a management role. I passed the assessment and interviews and have been handling real time analysts for almost a year now.

Recently, I’ve tried my hand with online freelance jobs as well, mainly as a customer service specialist. It was pretty challenging and definitely a different pace working from home. It definitely helped that I am highly organized and task oriented. I keep a timeline that helps me more efficiently.