Rienzi Ramirez

President & Country Manager

24/7 Customer Philippines, Inc

2018

Outstanding Leaders in Asia

Rienzi Ramirez

Outstanding Leaders in Asia

2018

President & Country Manager

24/7 Customer Philippines, Inc

Rienzi Ramirez

People Mastery

Rienzi Ramirez builds the business of connections by investing and building meaningful relationships with his people.

Boasting a headcount of over 4,000 employees across five sites in Manila and Cebu, 24/7 Customer Philippines, Inc. ([24]7.ai), headed by Rienzi Ramirez, is in the business of connections. In its highly competitive industry, the company differentiates itself with an integrated people and technology solution offer.

The company sees its Unique Selling Proposition as having the ability to combine the capacity of talented outsourced agents with customer interaction technology to deliver the best experience for customers to connect with its clients from Fortune 500 companies in the Telecommunications, Cable, and Retail industries across the United States and Australia.

Milestones that [24]7.ai have achieved include successful client contract renewals across 11 years; High Employee Satisfaction scores at 87 percent, and Leadership Satisfaction Scores at 92 percent satisfaction. The company also hit the 5,000-employee mark in 2017, and has deployed [24]7.ai Technology to disrupt current business models and deploy innovation, plus achieving record-breaking EBITDA (Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation) performance at 32 percent for the past year.

Formally trained with a BS in Industrial Economics, Ramirez also possesses two post graduate degrees – a Masters in Industrial Economics and an MBA from the Asian Institute of Management in the Philippines.

The intrepid entrepreneur credits his father, a successful entrepreneur who generated his own enterprise and wealth creating something from nothing, for his acumen. Ramirez attributes his competitive spirit to basketball legend, Michael Jordan. From a business perspective, he counts Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson to be great influences.

He counts among the most difficult business challenges faced by [24]7.ai leading it through business reductions and business growth. Ramirez also had to build up his resilience in facing the entire cycle/spectrum of business scenarios to develop the different leadership characteristics needed for success across different business conditions.

As the leader of a people-based organisation, Ramirez makes big investments in time and resources on staff development, as he believes that learning and development will pay off in the overall results and retention of the company’s top talents.

Overall, Ramirez considers that his company’s high satisfaction rating of 87 percent comes from recognising how committed the company is to finding opportunities for its employees’ personal and professional growth.

In the area of CSR, [24]7.ai committed to an internal CSR initiative called Lingap, derived from playing with the words ‘Linking the Gap’, which opens opportunities for employees to help their colleagues who are in need through employee donation and counseling.

In 2016, [24]7.ai conducted an external CSR initiative in partnership with Generation Hope, Inc. to provide classrooms to public school children all over the country by selling bottled water through a programme called Hope in a Bottle. They also sponsored a school in the Philippines by giving out sports equipment and office supplies for the students and teachers of Emilio Jacinto Elementary School. And, in January 2018, donated toiletries to the kids and families of Childhope Philippines.

With regard to success, Ramirez shared that he felt what matters most is how he has achieved mutual success with the people whom he has built meaningful relationships with. In terms of personality and leadership style to other peers in his industry, Ramirez feels that his biggest difference was his willingness to disrupt and challenge the conventional thinking of everyone around him.

For Ramirez, he does not take the ACES award as his own but offers it up to the people who make up [24]7.ai to attest to the collective efforts over the past decade that amounted to the recognition.