UAE | General
Call centres in India face challenges
The last thing you would expect India's call-centre bosses to be worrying about is a shortage of staff.
- The Economist
- Published: 00:00 September 14, 2005
The last thing you would expect India's call-centre bosses to be worrying about is a shortage of staff.
The business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, including a wide range of services besides manning the telephone, employs an estimated 348,000 people.
Nearly 3 million English speakers graduate from university every year. That has been India's big attraction: call-centres have been spoilt for choice. Yet finding and retaining qualified workers has become the industry's biggest medium-term worry. It may, as a new report by Gartner, a consultancy, puts it "stall the offshore call-centre boom".
The infant industry has grown explosively. Youngsters have hopped from job to job. Staff-attrition rates for the industry as a whole have climbed to 45-50 per cent a year. Entry-level salaries have now reached about Rs10,000 (Dh840), considered very high for a first job (which explains why outsourcing to India remains so attractive). Training costs are also mounting, as firms take on less-qualified applicants.
Sam Chopra, president of the Call Centre Association of India (CCAI), which represents about 60 of India's 400-odd BPO firms, says the pressure is such that firms do not always check staff references at once. Such slipshod practices are blamed for the very few, but widely publicised, fraud scandals.
Call-centre jobs, rather glamorous until recently, are losing their allure. Staff often have to work nights, put up with abuse and undergo undignified security checks. With the number of BPO workers expected to reach 1 million by 2009, a shortfall of 260,000 qualified personnel is predicted.
Sujay Chohan, of Gartner, contrasts BPO with India's booming software-development industry. There, Indian firms grew in parallel with their mostly American clients. Engineering colleges, in-house trainers and private institutes kept pace with demand. In businesses such as call-centres, however, growth is even faster and training has been much less organised.
The industry is beginning to help itself. The CCAI, with the Confederation of Indian Industry, has launched a training initiative. It will offer a standardised qualification for new BPO workers: improving English, "neutralising" accents, teaching some computer skills and so on.
Nasscom, a lobby for the software and services industry, is also introducing an "assessment and certification" programme for would-be employees. Such schemes should cut costs, ease wage pressures and help keep crooks out.
India still has a unique combination of manpower and English-language skills. But the full potential of BPO, beyond call-centres, has only been glimpsed there are huge emerging markets in legal services, accounting, healthcare, personnel services, and so on.
It would be a shame if India were to miss out by misusing its one unbeatable, seemingly inexhaustible resource: well-educated young people.
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