A Provincial Philippine Outsourcing Success Story with Veronica Valera Tuason of Intelliworx PH

Veronica Valera Tuason returns to the Outsource Accelerator Podcast with a genuine success story. She is the co-founder and COO of Intelliworx PH, a homegrown, province-based outsourcing firm in Occidental Mindoro, Philippines.

She started the company at 26, during the pandemic, and learned the business on the go. Five years later, Intelliworx has grown from three people to nearly 200, and both staff and clients have stayed the whole way.

Veronica shares how a small-town firm built that record, and how it is handling AI.

Intelliworx PH

Intelliworx runs from one large office in the town of San Jose, and it operates 24/7. The firm is locally owned and homegrown, which Veronica is proud of.

It also spans four service pillars:

• Customer service and sales
• Virtual assistants
• Accounting and bookkeeping
• Industry specialists

“Intelliworx is a province-based outsourcing center in the Philippines, particularly in a province called Occidental Mindoro… We were established back in May 2020 during the height of the pandemic. And in a span of five years, we have grown from a team of just three, now we’re a team of almost 200 people.”

That growth carries real weight locally, because the firm now ranks among the province’s top three employers.

“Connecting people here in our small town to international clients, that’s really a big deal for us.”

Rejecting the big call centre model

At first, Intelliworx benchmarked itself against the big metro call centres. However, that model did not fit a smaller talent market.

“We actually realized that that model might not really be a good fit for us… we cannot compete in that way because the talent pool here is not as competitive as compared to in the metro.”

So Veronica flipped the approach. Instead of chasing volume, the team matched the skills it could find to demand from abroad.

“We identified what are the actual talents, skills available to us right now… we started looking for opportunities internationally that we can match it up with the potential and the skills available here.”

Turning graduates into client-ready talent

Most hires are young provincial graduates. As a result, training does the heavy lifting, and it runs for months rather than days.

“It’s a long training. It spans for probably two to three months of training those individuals to make sure that they really have that solid foundation.”

During screening, communication comes first, because it is the hardest skill to build in a short window.

“We look at if they have excellent communication first and foremost, because that’s something that’s a little bit harder to train.”

Winning trust through transparency

Veronica credits transparency for the firm’s loyalty. Early on, she admits, the team sometimes oversold. Now they lead with honesty instead.

“What I learned in these past few years is to become transparent, both with our employees and our clients… That’s why we’re really pushing transparency and setting their expectations: this is the reality of what we can do, what we cannot do.”

She even scopes client success metrics openly, then commits to closing the gap over time. That candour builds trust, and some clients have stayed since 2021, growing from two agents into teams of twenty.

“If they have a list of, let’s say, 10 points of their success metrics, we can tell them that we can only hit five, and we can work on continuously meeting the next six to 10 in the future.”

When the AI threat became real

Veronica is candid that AI has already cost jobs at Intelliworx. In 2024, the threat became a reality.

“We have some clients who have decided to replace the human interaction that we provide to their customers with AI… now the AI threat is no longer a threat. It’s a reality for some of our team members.”

One team vanished entirely as a result.

“We used to have a team of writers, content writers, copywriters, and now that team is completely gone.”

Rather than resist, she chose to lean in. Today the firm trains staff to treat AI as a tool that powers quality rather than replaces it.

Betting on sustainable growth

These days, Veronica prefers steady, manageable growth over big and risky accounts. She is clear that her early targets were unrealistic.

“Before, we were ambitious and probably a bit unrealistic… We wanted to grow to like 500 in our third year… now I’m more comfortable, because it’s manageable, it’s sustainable long term, rather than closing bigger accounts and then, once those big accounts are lost, our business will be hugely impacted.”

She sees the firm’s future in judgment-heavy roles that AI cannot easily replace, supported by tools like Claude.

“We have already started using Claude, because Claude is amazing. We recently started using it to empower and support our leaders and some of our agents, so that they can work better, more fast, and more efficiently.”

For Veronica, Intelliworx shows that strong outsourcing does not have to come from a big city. With honest expectations, deep training, and AI used as a tool rather than a replacement, a small provincial team can serve international clients and lift a whole town as it grows.

To learn more about Intelliworx PH, visit intelliworxph.com or connect with the team on LinkedIn. Veronica herself can be reached via her LinkedIn profile or through email at veronica@intelliworxph.com.

If you’d like to learn more about what we do in the outsourcing space, send us an email at ask@outsourceaccelerator.com.