The employer wants to see self-awareness of common Philippine English patterns that can sound unprofessional or unclear to foreign customers, and a willingness to edit your own writing for an international audience.
Name three concrete, common mistakes from Filipino corporate or BPO writing, then explain your personal habit or checklist to prevent each one. Avoid vague answers like 'grammar' and instead give before and after examples.
Start by naming three mistakes that are genuinely common in Philippine BPO writing, and give a before and after for each so the interviewer hears you think in examples. Say plainly that one is the missing past participle, where agents write "I already send the report" instead of "I have already sent the report," and that the fix is to read your sentence aloud and check that the verb ends in -ed or -en when the action is finished. Another is the overuse of "po" and "mam/sir" in written replies, which reads as overly deferential or confusing to customers in the US, UK, or Australia, so drop those entirely and keep a neutral, professional tone. A third is wordiness that comes from translating Taglish thought patterns directly, like "For your information, I would like to inform you that" which should simply be "Here is" or "Please note." Explain that your habit is to keep a personal checklist of these three patterns, and before you hit send, you scan for them, then you mentally test whether a customer in another time zone would understand the sentence on the first read. If you are unsure, you rewrite it shorter. Close by saying you also use the grammar checker in your email tool as a second pair of eyes, but you never rely on it alone because it misses tone.
A common mistake is answering 'I will fixed that for you po' or 'Mam, I already send the email'. Instead, say 'I will fix that for you' and 'I have already sent the email', and avoid adding 'po' or 'mam/sir' to written foreign customer replies.
Situation
During my onboarding as a customer service intern at a local e-commerce company, my team lead showed me a list of common mistakes agents made, and I was asked to self-audit my own draft replies.
Task
I had to identify three mistakes in my own written English that could confuse a foreign customer and rewrite my standard greeting and apology templates to remove them.
Action
I listed the three biggest mistakes I saw: using 'Mam/Sir' instead of the customer's name, translating Tagalog word order directly like 'Your order we already shipped', and using 'for a while' when I meant 'in the meantime'. I then wrote a new greeting template: 'Hi Alex, thanks for reaching out.' I replaced every 'kindly do' with 'please', and I asked a senior agent to review my first ten tickets.
Result
After two weeks, my team lead noted that my replies had zero instances of Taglish and my average first-contact resolution score improved by 12 percent compared to my initial drafts.
Self-audit for direct translations and unnecessary formality.
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