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Out of India

Outsourcing Call Centers to India Losing Its Luster

By Tom Glaister
ConsumerAffairs.com

February 5, 2007
I was sitting on a beach in Goa the other day, a state in the south west of India and I fell in love.

Just a few metres away from me sat an Indian girl on a sarong, dressed in a bikini the same color as her eyes.

Hindu morals prevent 98% of Indian women from ever being seen in something as indecent as a bikini and so I assumed she must be from a wealthier family, where tradition had been left behind in the embrace of the modern world.

She started mouthing something and I leaned across, hoping she was inviting me to come and share her sarong. I shuffled over and she looked me in the eye and asked:

"Is 'tomato' pronounced the same way as 'potato' all over the United States?"

It was hardly the romantic beginning I'd hoped for and it soon emerged that Sita was an accent trainer for the burgeoning Indian call center business. Her job was to go in and teach Indian graduates the nuances and variations of English dialects from Australia to the UK to America.

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While it's something of a status symbol for the richer classes in India to speak fluent English, sometimes even as a first language, they often use archaic words such as 'rascal' or 'bamboozle'. To handle American customers, it was necessary that they could both understand, say, a thick Brooklyn accent and also reply without using any of the kind of language more at home in a Rudyard Kipling novel.

My romantic interest now began to merge with a growing curiousity as to what an Indian call center must be like.

I'd been on the receiving end of trying to order a Dell computer by phone a couple of years before, when someone claiming he was called Patrick (but was probably named Vishal) refused to believe I didn't have a permanent address. Needless to say, I went down to Circuit City and got a laptop from someone I could look in the eye.

"Any chance of a job?" I asked Sita. She grinned and invited me to go along the next day.

Makes Sense on Paper

Outsourcing call centers to places like India makes perfect economic sense. On paper. Computer, insurance and telecom companies have all seen fit in recent years to move their technical support and complaints divisions to Indian companies such as the one Sita worked for.

India being a much poorer country, wages for a call center job approach 25% or less of what an American worker would be paid for the same job. And neither is it exploitation. At 15,000 rupees a month (around $350) working in a cell center brings an India worker twice what he might earn as a high school teacher and ten times more than an agricultural laborer.

In many ways, BPO (business process outsourcing) is a clear sign of the times. In an era of globalization why wouldn't a company in a free market move its jobs to where workers could be paid less?

The French have call centers in their former colonies of Morocco and Tunisia and both Portugal and Spain have people in Latin America picking up the phones to deal with difficult customers. Note that very few companies outsource their sales teams though.

I found an old shirt and tried to iron it by laying it beneath my suitcase and jumping up and down on it a few times before I went for my interview the next day. The result wasn't pretty but Sita didn't seem too embarrassed when I turned up at her office in Panajim, the hub of economic activity and call centers in Goa.

While we waited for her supervisor to come through I opened the door to the main operating room and saw around 50 Indians with headsets sitting in front of computers, some of them playing minesweeper while they pretended to listen to customers calling from every state in the union. They all wore expressions of infinite tedium and their eyes rolled as they read scripted replies off sheets of paper in front of them.

"I am sorry, madam, but it seems we have no proof of your letter detailing cancellation of contract and your credit card has been charged accordingly." one Indian guy recited into the mouthpiece while he sent an SMS message to a friend.

He nodded once or twice and then yawned. "I understand, madam -- may I recommend you send the letter again?" He paused for a moment and then turned to look at me with a smile. "She hung up!" he grinned.

I took the opportunity to ask about work conditions and "Peter" (or rather, Ajay -- assumed English names being an integral part of customer service) explained to me that while the salary was good there was no opportunity for advancement and so no incentive to work that hard.

"And is it really my problem if her cell phone has stopped working?" he complained, "She probably dropped it or something and now she wants to take it out on me!"

I assumed that after a day of listening to complaints he needed someone to listen to him. But I also reflected on how foreign concepts like customer service were in a place like India.

The renowned author of "Maximum City," Suketu Mehta, commented on the absurdity of the government's professed claim to bring India into the 21st century, "...as if the 20th century could be skipped altogether."

Intelligence but No Infrastructure

Not that India lacks anything in terms of intelligent, skilled workers, natural resources or a rich, cultural history -- what it lacks is a working infrastructure.

There's often no water in the taps, there are power cuts umpteen times a day and corruption is so endemic that there's no guarantee that the most basic job will be done professionally. Every time that my neighbor uses his washing machine my internet connection dies for 2 hours due to some half-assed job done on the cables below ground.

So when an Indian goes to work for Dell or AT&T, a good accent may help him answer the call, with practice he may even be able to understand a thick southern drawl -- but will he do any more than strictly required to help out a customer?

"The job is easy." Ajay smiled, happy at the thought of an English workmate, "You just read from the sheets -- there are answers for everything here."

So while globalization may have made BPO outsourcing a logical move, at least as far as the profit managers are concerned, there's still a great deal of naivete involved when it comes to moving jobs to developing countries.

When I thought of the difficulties involved in doing something as simple as buying a train ticket in India, the first time I heard of call centers moving to India I burst out laughing.

And, in its most innocuous form, the whole outsourcing phenomenon can be quite amusing. Take, for instance, American students who have a paper to hand in first thing Monday on the causes of the Civil War but have a party to go to that night -- with their academic future in one hand and the thought of a hot date that night, they make the obvious choice and turn to the internet to find someone in India who can write the essay for them.

There are sites that offer ready-made articles or allow students to commission Indian graduates to do their homework in return for what amounts to a fraction of their weekly allowance. But is it likely an Indian will contribute any original insights about the disastrous split between the American North and South more than 100 years ago?

Or, to show outsourcing at its most surreal, take the computer gamers who can't be bothered advancing a character in a role-playing game to higher levels and instead commission gamers in India to go through all the tedious business of slaying orcs to gain hit points.

Life and Death

Outsourcing can be quite sinister though.

For many people in India the battle for survival is a daily struggle and parting with, say, a kidney to a sick American in need of a transplant, may be the only way that they can buy enough rice to eat that summer. There are doctors more than willing to perform the operations and plenty of Americans desperate to live longer and happy to pay for it.

Or if that doesn't stretch your sense of morality, how about the rent-a-womb development where poor Indian women are paid to grow babies for childless couples in the West?

For as little as $2,000, a couple can have their baby fertilized in a test tube and then implanted in the womb of an Indian woman. The "mother" is required to sign over all rights to the baby immediately upon delivering and is left with a fistful of cash to replace the physical and emotional loss and trauma of nurturing a human life and relinquishing it at once to someone halfway around the world.

Sometimes to understand the point you have to stretch it.

The outsourcing trend may seem a natural progression in some ways but there's more to financial transactions than straight profit. Call centers in India make economic sense on paper but not, perhaps, so much in the real world where there are ethical and practical concerns.

What about all the American workers who lost their call center jobs to India? It's not as if they were able to compete with salaries in a developing country.

And while the decision to reroute technical support to India may have made perfect sense to an internet company based in San Francisco, the reality has often proved far more messy -- with thousands of calls a day from Americans with every kind of accent, vocabulary and social background, the Indian staff have often been quite overwhelmed and even helpless to understand just what was being said.

Rethinking Outsourcing

In response, large companies from Apple to Dell have cancelled plans for call center expansion in India after being swamped with complaints by phone, letter and in their website forums. Dell CIO, Randy Mott, commented after withdrawing a call center from Bangalore: "We certainly learned a lot of things, and we'll be smarter about our growth in newly developed areas."

Many major companies across the world are bringing technical support jobs back home as they recognize that competent, helpful advice is the kind of after-sales service that can mark them apart from the competition.

With growing consumer dissatisfaction with outsourced call centers, the computer companies in particular are recognizing that competent, helpful support is something the customer looks for when buying a laptop -- especially when he can't manage to log on to myspace.com that day.

And then there's the question of security.

In a country like India, as in most developing countries, almost anything is available for a price. It doesn't reflect upon the honesty of Indians, simply on the economic realities and lack of governmental regulation.

There have been numerous instances of employees copying confidential information onto compact discs, presumably for sale. And while the Indian call center firms do everything in their power to stop this, when someone can use their cell phone to photograph your credit card number from a computer screen, just how safe can it be to shop over the phone?

Back in Panajim, Sita's supervisor walked in, took one look at me and told me blankly that there were no vacancies at that time. I couldn't understand how he came so quickly to that conclusion until Sita told me later that evening over a coffee.

"He said he wouldn't hire anyone wearing a shirt with such creases in it. He thought it was a sure sign that you wouldn't be trustworthy."

Tom Glaister is the founder and editor of www.roadjunky.com - The Online Travel Guide for the Free and Funky Traveller - and goaguide.org.

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