Are call centers not cut out for India?

- Labour news from UNI global union - for trade unions in a global services economy.

- How times change? In the first few years of offshoring business services to India, business process outsourcing (BPO) was synonymous with call centers. In the U.S, everyone wanted to locate a call center in India and in India, everyone wanted to start a "call center" business.

Since then, India has become an outsourcing powerhouse, with global corporations trying to do everything from engineering design to editorial services, and automotive design to airlines back office. Yet, the services that started it all, makes news for wrong reasons. Most of the news that makes a splash today are about call centers being located back to the U.S.

The latest one is AT&T's announcement that it is bringing back in-house some 2000 customer services jobs outsourced "both domestically and overseas". The announcement, which does not say where the jobs are currently, however, makes many conclude that they are in India.

Well, they could well be in India. AT&T has most certainly taken back some call center jobs from India, most notably from Convergys' India centers and from a host of Indian companies. But to the best of my knowledge, that was well before this announcement.

Nitty-gritty's apart, the fact remains that AT&T and a host of other companies are "restructuring" the distribution of their call centers and in many cases, it has resulted in some services being taken back onshore from an offshore center. Recently, Powergen of U.K. and Apple Computers also decided to take back some call center jobs back home. For your record, this story, filed a couple of months earlier, gives a short list of such pullbacks.

The anti-offshoring brigade has a very simple explanation for this trend: customer service is not the best thing to be done offshore, and customers do not like it; hence, the reversal.

It just sounds too simple to be true. The real reason may be a little different.

The truth is closest to what BusinessWeek wrote in a July story, Call Center? That's so 2004.

Americans, it seems, hate calling a help desk or customer service number to find an Indian on the line. Well, guess what, America? India doesn't particularly want to talk to you, either. As India's top companies get more sophisticated at taking over outsourced work from U.S. and European multinationals, they're finding that the lowest end of the business -- call centers -- just doesn't pay anymore.
So, while there is truth in the reasoning that the customers of American companies do not like it in many cases, it is equally true that for many offshore service providers, it is not a very attractive business anymore. The reasons are many.

While the call center services are getting more and more commoditized, bringing down prices, providing the services is not easy. True, it requires comparatively less brainpower than many other services. But it requires extensive training in accent, in culture, which results in higher cost. And, of course, there is a limit on how much can you train people on conversing with people in a land they have never seen. It is not like writing codes for programs or designing a hi-tech product.

Attrition of people — the single biggest problem in Indian offshoring — is also maximum in call centers — not just because of the abusive language that the agents have to listen to, but also because they have to work through the night, as India is separated from the U.S by close to 9.5 hours to 13.5 hours depending on what U.S time zone the customer is in.

While the entry level workers in any non-voice work like claims processing and content editing care least about the geography of the client of their employers, there is a distinct preference by many call center workers to work in a "U.K shift". U.K. has a time difference of only five and half hours with India and many find it better to work till 10.30-11 in the night, rather than work through the entire night.

"So lately, Indian outsourcers have begun turning down call center contracts, preferring better-paying deals for processing mortgages, handling insurance claims, overseeing payrolls, and more," says the BusinessWeek article.

Another less discussed reason is this: In the early days of offshoring, when Indian capabilities were not proved, many companies got into this game by bagging short-term telemarketing campaigns, which were easy to come by. Most companies started as telemarketers and since customer service requires similar kind of infrastructure and training of manpower; they also got into the latter. By that time, the India wave had caught up in the U.S and getting even customer services deals was easy. A few made a transition from telemarketing to customer services. Many smaller companies who could not make that successful transition are now extinct, thanks to the Do Not Call regime. With the lure of getting first few deals easily not valid anymore, because of DNC, even small companies are not looking at call center services as a business.

The lesser activity in offshoring of call centers, hence, is dictated as much by lack of interest by service providers as it is by the growing dissatisfaction of consumers.

As they say, when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different.

http://www.globalservicesmedia.com/blog/hottopics/archives/2006/09/are_call_center.html

source : UNI 29.09.2006