Indian Call centers : Why is the problem in quality

Well, there is election year in US and everyone wants to get benefit of current hype about the white coller jobs shift to low-cost countries (india china and other asian countries). People are talking of big and small significant or not. BPO jobs are the one getting more light in the media. Call center jobs are being hit hardest. It is the age of information and globalisation, Companies are investing where they are seeing more returns for low investments. But some people who are affected by this new trend of job shift or new job creation in the low-cost countries, give many reasons why these jobs should not be created in foreign land. One of the major reason that is again and again pointed out is accent problem and non-efficient staff in handlling queries of cutomers. Some of the major companies (like dell) have completely withdrawn there operations from india or have limited their operations.Answer to this question, the complaints about quality and efficiency are not very easy to answer. It is the same media which on some other platform will say that india has second largest population of english speaking people in the world. So we should not go blindly with media reports and try to find the real problem and its solution.One has to be agree about the fact that call center job is very much different than the software development job. In software developemnt there is rarely any interaction with the costumer of each and every programmer working in banglore, hydrabad or gurgaon. It is very selective, generally management guys, who interact with the costumer. Even these managament guys do not interact with the consumer, it is the job of local sales-paerson who interact with the local person. So in software developement there is rarely any chance of problem in accent or anything else.When comes the job of call center, each person working in the call center has to attend and reply calls from customer. These young guys and girls working in these call centers are probably doing their first job of any kind. These executives are taught about the the technical things of handling softwares they use to reply. But using software is not the only thing they are taught, they have extensive lectures and labs, where they are taught about cultural difference. From my personal experience i know it is not easy for an english speaking person to understand other person of other country. In case of call centers in india, one solution they try to apply is by changing names and teaching to change the accent. For example anil may become andy and maneka may become monica. Well in my opinion there is no need to change names of the people. it does not serve much purpose. In my opinion instead of changing names these peoples can use just the initials to make life simple for the costumers, if it is the purpose.These executives are repeatedly shown some classics movies about accent and made to learn and speak in that perticular accent. In my opinion here all the problems come. They try to spean in an accent that is not native to them and dont have very long practice to speak in this new accent and they dont learn to speak with the slow speed of western world. It is well known fact indian english speaker speaks arround 140-150 words per minute while their counter parts, native english speakers, speak only 70-80 words per minute. So they are speaking a foreign language with almost at double speed.

last changed : 14th feb, 2004