Indian Call Centres

[PhilWarman]

I'm sure all the recent press has made many people stop and think when dealing with a company (in any walk of life from banks to insurance companies and breakdown providers) that outsources work to India etc.

To lighten it all up a bit, I have copied an extract from an Insurance forum I use with regards to a claim that was trying to be reported to an Indian Call Centre...

"[i]I interviewed a chap from Cunningham Lindsay, he was applying for claims at the time we had the call centre, and told a story of a call from a UK broker who had reported a claim to one our Indian colleagues, The Jist :
A car in London swerved to miss a pedestrian on a Zebra Crossing and ended up in a hotel Foyer. After 40 minutes explaining what a foyer was eventually relayed all of the details of the claim, only to close the call by being asked how the Zebra was.

Now, it is really a case of "Quote me Happy"?

[outbuy]

Sounds like an adventure similar to anything with foreign outsourcing, even between two english speaking chaps.

For instance, I know what a foyer is, but I have no idea either what a zebra crossing is unless you mean pedestrian crossing, because it is striped!

Jay
Outbuy Procurement Solutions

[Nimda]

I personally will try to avoid using any company that has call centres, even it the call centre is in the UK. If its not dealt with over the phone I like to know I can go to the branch and see someone face to face.

[PhilWarman]

Totally agree - out of principle I won't use companies who outsource abroad.

I hate bad service anyway, but bad service and not being able to understand the individual you are supposed to have confidence in (bank etc.) is just inexcusable and annoying.

[Ian J]

Originally Posted by Phil Warman

Totally agree - out of principle I won't use companies who outsource abroad.

One of the major bank owned factoring companies is in the process of moving much of it's credit control to India.

[Go4outsourcing.com]

Well, I competely agree with you guys about indian call centres. But let me tell you something about what I saw on tv :

All the big US and UK companies run a 3-6 months course to adjust indian accent to british and US accent. I was quiet astonished to see those indians speaking with british accent.

But I guess, thats only big companies who can afford to run special courses.

Peter

[outbuy]

There is a large majority of outsourcing. I wouldn't restrict your opinion. I would still use someone that outsources. Its the quality that reflects upon my opinion.

Bad quality = loss of my business, outsourced or not outsourced. I would rather use a web firm in India that gets my webpage done for cheap, but listens to all my comments, and does everything right (including no spelling errors), than use someone local for cheap, that gives me crap.

Also, companies that don't globalize these days will soon be dead. Can you afford 1000 programmers at $100 an hour, or 1000 at $15 that may work a little bit slower and you might have to have 10 supervisors at $100/hr?

[ConceptNetwork]

My own experience of seeing work offshored shows that although the basic cost of a worker is about 1/10th that of someone in the UK, there are also many other costs that have to be taken into account. The offshoring company will receive much more than the cost of basic wages. There are also huge costs involved in infrastructural changes, process changes etc. On top of all that you have software licensing costs, too, as the offshore company doesn't usually pay for the software. All of this needs managing, so you bring in a team of well paid middle-management guys to look after the relationship. In the end the savings are much, much smaller than it would seem.

(My experience concerns application development rather than call centre work, but I'm sure there are many similarities.)

With India now starting to demand better wages and benefits, I really don't see this lasting all that long before the work gets shipped out to the next cheapest country. As work begins to move from country to country, what security do we have for our personal information? But that leads to an interesting point; Does the fault lie with corrupt off-shore workers, or has the problem always been there, but masked by the fact that it's generally not worth us trying to sell such information as our wages are worth more than the risk? Perhaps it is how we store and use data that needs to be looked at, not where that data is used.

[Go4outsourcing.com]

Well I competely agree with you conceptwork. Wages in india are not that cheap any more. My friend has a quote for website for $2500 in Australia and he got it done for $2000 in india.

India is having a shortage of 1 million I.T workers. So you can guess in few years what kind of wage are those people going to demand.

So it will mainly depend on how well you can manage your customers privacy and relationship by offshoring.

Peter

[outbuy]

You guys are right, definitely tons of other issues. I know lots of people that manufacture (more my environment) offshore, China and India mostly. Costs are rising, but saving $500 on a $2500 job is a big difference, especially if you converted that to manufacturing where it happens 100000 times a year. Negatives in this industry include lesser quality sometimes, high ratio of bad/unacceptable products, mistakes that can't be caught and corrected (especially bad on the first batch of multiple products) etc. You may be able to recoup some of that through contracts, just don't pay before delivery.

Jay
Outbuy Procurement Solutions