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Victor Hugo Baseggio, CI, Brazil

VHB: The quality of the schools, their facilities and the way they provide the content for the students have been upgraded a great deal. In the past there were the labs now there are smart boards and Wi-FI in the classrooms. It’s a new era of interactivity although I still believe the traditional way of learning brings consistent results.

In 2013 we will be sending 65,000 people overseas

The PIE: What do Brazilians look for in a programme?

VHB: The cultural experience that the partner schools can guarantee our students and the nationality mix are irreplaceable, I don’t think you can get it through e-learning for instance. Maybe in the future there will be new technologies coming but I don’t think that it’s possible to compare with a real life experience. And the Brazilian way of enjoying interacting with other people will continue for a long time.

“We are the only language agent in Brazil that have both tele-sales and customer care services open seven days a week”

The PIE: Let’s talk about the operational challenges of running a company that big. How do you ensure all your staff know your products well?

VHB: We created our own academia which is an e-learning tool available 24 hours a day for our staff. We can track all the content that our staff has access to, and the managers can control it. It’s not just a power point presentation. On top of that we also do the web seminars and we record them so people can watch them at any time.

The PIE: How has the way your client books and interacts with CI changed?

VHB: We have a mobility problem in the big cities in Brazil as you know. Sometimes to go to one area to another can take up to two hours so going back and forth is not very wise. The telephone is used a great deal. Since approximately 2,000 100% of our customers have visited our website before contacting us. There is e-mail interaction and the use of social media as well. Then we have the call centre which has been pretty helpful. We are the only language agent in Brazil that have both tele-sales and customer care services open seven days a week.

The PIE: How often do you change your product line?

VHB: We review it constantly, but we have a process– before we start dealing with a new service we go through a lot of analysis and its impacts on training our staff. There are some programmes that you need to have a specialist to deal with like the high school or au pair. We have to make sure that all stores have that, or if that particular store is not going to have a specialist then the call centre is going to come in. We have a call centre that supports both the final consumers and the B2B as well. CI hotline serves our 330 store sales staff if they need any help or assistance.

The PIE: Do you think there’s going to be a rise in interest in higher education and is that a market you’re in? 

“There is still a considerable number of US universities that don’t care about us or do not see us as a distribution option for their programmes”

VHB: Yes definitely, we’ve been trying to enter that market. But as you well know, it’s so vast and there are so many players. We can make sure that we know all the English schools operating in London but all the different university options available in London is not a piece of information easily available. I would say that 99.9% of all language schools would like to cooperate with agents. Maybe half of the existing universities think the same.

The PIE: Considering the NACAC ruling in the US allowing members to use agents, have you seen any tangible change in universities reaching out to work with you? 

VHB: No, I see that some universities are more and more trying to expand their own distribution, while others are reconsidering the sales through agents. I would remark that there is still a considerable number of universities that don’t care about us or do not see us as a distribution option for their programmes.

The PIE: What will the next 25 years bring CI?

VHB: We will continue with the focus on listening to our consumers but I think technology is going to be a key factor for the surviving agents. Additional services in different areas are going to bring interesting opportunities. The old say ‘High Tech High Touch’ still moves us forward.

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