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Booming Business
From
phone and e-mail-based support to data analysis and telemarketing, Indian
call centres are using technology to deliver a commoditised service to
western clients. India Today Principal Correspondent Stephen David takes
a look.
Suzanne
Smith is a typical 24-year-old college grad from Maryland. She wears faded
Lee jeans and watches Ally McBeal and Friends on TV. At least, that's
what she says to callers from the US, UK or Australia, if they ask. Her
real name—Sumathi Tavarakere—is not easy for them to pronounce.
And if they listen closely, they might be able to discern a South East
Asian flavour in her carefully cultivated West Coast accent. Tavarakere
is really from Tumkur district in south Karnataka, and a member of the
booming business that's saving American, British and Australian companies
millions of dollars. Indian companies are using technology and a reservoir
of English-speaking people to deliver a commoditised information-technology-enabled
service. These firms handle phone-and e-mail-based customer support, data
analysis, telemarketing, collections and Web-chat services for their American
clients. Call centres across the country are going the whole hog to please
clients and build a rapport with customers. And an entire sub-industry
has emerged to train aspiring call centre agents not only how to answer
calls, but also which accent to do so in. When an American, say, Jack,
calls a toll-free number in the United States to report a wrong entry
in his bank credit card statement, the call is often routed through fast
fibre-optic cables to a centre in India. The friendly voice that answers
sounds like it's from Wisconsin or Wyoming. That's the result of comprehensive
linguistic and cultural training. According to the call centre's client,
if Tavarakere revealed her real name or location, the intimacy of the
conversation would evaporate. Tavarakere has even created an American
family history: she got her arts degree from George Washington University;
her parent th, are British immigrants who live in Columbia, Maryland;
and she has a 22-year old sister named Becky. Vaibhav Tewari, ceo of the
500-seater iSeva, one of the eight call centres in Bangalore, brushes
off accusations of deception. "It is only for the sake of the customer,"
he says "He should not be figuring out how to pronounce your name.
He will take 15 minutes to do that and our phone time is important."
Call centre agents have to undergo rigorous training. They are put through
four weeks of speech training to acquire an American or British accent,
depending on the clientele. They bone up on Yankee or British slang while
being fed American tv serials to bridge the cultural gap between Tumkur
and Boston.
The stress is on American English because 80 per cent of the call centre
business in India stems from the US. "A US accent is a valuable commodity
here," says M. Radhika of brand.comm. Small wonder then, that institutes
have cropped up to train call centres aspirants how to acquire a Yankee
twang. In cities like Bangalore, finding fresh graduates who can be trained
to speak like Americans is easy. "But those used to speaking only
in their mother tongues like Kannada or Tamil, need special tutoring,"
says Aneesh Nair, managing director of Bangalore's Call Center College.
"I call this a mother tongue interference that can mar a good business
deal." Computer-based tuition is a large part of the four to six
week training, with courses designed by US language specialists. English
is broken down into phonetics and pupils are taught how an Indian and
an American pronounce the same words. For example, operatives are asked
to say —Good moarnin— to callers from the US and—Hai maite—to
Australians. Aspiring call centre agents are taught the basic geography
of the US and introduced to American culture and sports. The college's
course on Americanisms is quite a hit, with subjects like "Shopping
at a Mall on Public Holiday" to "Health Insurance". It
is essential for business that the agents u rAsset, whose clients include
a large US telecom company. "The idea is to make the caller think
he is talking to someone round the corner," says Prakash Gurbaxani,
ceo of 24x7 customer.com, a call centre in Bangalore with a daily average
of 5,000 calls to US customers. Gurbaxani, whose clients include AltaVista
and Shutterfly.com, says American clients rarely find out that the toll-free
1-800 call is being answered in India. Be that as it may, what are the
broader implications of adopting an accent, a western name, building a
false history? Author Arundhati Roy had this to say: "The adoption
of American accents for jobs in call centres show how easily an ancient
civilisation can be made to abase itself completely. ... It's a fascinating
phenomenon, the other side of religious fundamentalism." But most
operatives drop the accent along with the headphone. Tavarakere, for one,
says, "Just because you talk like an American does not mean you are
Americanised. I have not been there even." But they agree that it
does filter into other aspects of their life. "We lead dual lives,"
says call centre operative Sundar Manoharan, 21, who often goes by the
name of Sam.
We are Americans during the night and Indians during the day. That's only
for money ... This is a conscious effort at work, only for work's sake."
As is true of most outsourced overseas work for US companies, cheaper
cost is the main reason the call centre business has picked up in India.
With low rupee costs and high dollar revenues, Indian call centres are
about 40-50 per cent cent cheaper to run than US ones. Most agents here
start out by getting Rs 6,000 to 10,000 ($120 to $200) a month, compared
to $25,000 (Rs 11.75 lakh) to $32,000 (Rs 15.04 lakh) a year for the same
job in the US. Routing the calls to India through dedicated undersea cable
lines does not substantially increase costs. Another advantage: the attrition
rate at Indian call centres is 10-15 per cent compared to the US average
of 50 per cent.
Sumathi earns about Rs 6 s $ 3 per night shift. Although the
50,000 seats in India do not run to full capacity, more are being added
as business is expected to boom. Revenues are expected to rise from about
$160 million to $4.3 billion by 2008, says a nasscom and McKinsey &
Company survey.
The real action at these offices begins around 9 p.m. ist. , when most
people in the US are beginning their day. Tavarakere's night shift has
come to an end. She removes her Nortel Network headset, switches off her
Compaq computer and tells her American client, "Let's touch base
tomorrow". It has been a good business call. One of those that helped
Indian call centres rake
in Rs 850 crore this year.
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