The going may not be easy for call centres

High quality Indian call centres working on behalf of well known multinationals are expected to dominate the industry for the forseeable future. But there is growing evidence of UK consumer dissatisfaction with 60 per cent of call centre work at the lower end of the pyramid, known as the transactional level, carried out in India.

These are the conclusions of UK-based call centre researcher Mike Allen, who says: "I have never said that Indian call centres are generically bad, but the results of our consumer research show that the UK consumer on the lower end stuff, the transactional work, was unimpressed.

"We're talking about the bottom end of the pyramid, which accounts for 60 per cent of the work done globally, is transactional work, like 'can I have the train time, can I have a bank balance inquiry'. Its very simple stuff."

Eighteen months ago Allen's company, call and contact research centre specialists Mitial, commissioned a survey that asked consumers to list their preference and experience of offshore call centres.

The survey was based on a sample of 1,048 people interviewed at five locations – Slough, Dublin, Glasgow, Cardiff and Birmingham. "When asked what was their experience of offshore call centres, a massive number said they had experience of India and a massive number said they weren't happy with that," explains Allen.

"Our belief is that at the highest level India along with the Philippines is probably unassailable in terms of the quality-cost combination. This is the high-end technical support involving high-end Micro-soft coding type work where the location of the agent is completely irrelevant to the levels of sophistication they have.

"I'll give you a good example of that. If you fall out of a helicopter in the South China Sea, or in the North Sea off an oil rig, when you press your radio on your life vest, that radio goes to a highly skilled agent who tries to get you back in that helicopter. It's very high-level stuff.

"What our research shows is that problems arise at the lower levels where the consumer might be calling a call centre to move a direct debit from one place to another, that's where there is a problem."

Troubles

Problems are also starting to arise at the next level up where the founding managers of the call centre phenomenon are moving on to new and better jobs, many of them in attractive foreign locations.

"They have moved out of India and are looking at the career ladder to move up internationally," Allen said.

"What that is creating in India is a problem with middle management. You never had a lot of experienced middle management and now the leading agents who spent 18 months in the call centres learning the ropes are moving out."

Because of the profits involved, the call centre industry in India is now also attracting small-scale entrepreneurs who are willing to work for peanuts for some UK and European customers.
"As they don't need international approval, they get going and pick up some fairly crappy international business rather than the AOL or choice IBM sites," says Allen.

"The reality of it is there are plenty of people in Europe or the UK who are only too happy to come in with an ultra low cost supplier, give them a project to do that is not viable to do in the US or Europe, screw them to the floor.

Planning

"If you look at the trickle- down effect from the client, down to the Indian management, through to the agents who are recruited, you have a situation that assumes delivery before the project has even started. It's actually poorly planned.

All is not lost, however, Allen asserts, because UK companies are still discovering the advantages of Indian call centres. Contrary to a recent newspaper report, he adds, there is no evidence of UK companies pulling out of India because of a few negative experiences.

"In the UK the wildebeest sniffed India, trotted across the river and now the wildebeest are in full flight," he said.

"That will go on for probably a year at least. The only country that will become potentially a serious offshore rival to India is probably the Philippines."

The only short term danger he forsees is that what he describes as some of the lower end call centre operations will be replaced by technology in about two years time, resulting in some job losses.

"The big chance for the Indian call centre industry is to develop a very strong out sourcing community of Indian owned companies, not US or UK owned outsourcers. They need to develop as many high quality outsourcers as possible so that when the wind shifts direction they won't be shut down."