Poor Call-Center Service Angers Indians, Too

With better-paid, better-trained operators working for foreign call centers, Indian consumers are often frustrated by the service they get

The other day, after her cell phone stopped working during a trip, Beth Tomlinson used a pay phone to call her cell-phone carrier. Her call, like so many others around the world, was answered in Noida, an outsourcing-driven boom town about 20 kilometers outside New Delhi. Tomlinson, a Kansas-native who has lived in India for several years, didn't really care. After all, she was in Noida, too.

But when 20 minutes with a nervous operator went by and her cell phone still didn't work, Tomlinson did start to care. "I've called my American cell-phone company and had the call answered in Noida, and I've called my Indian cell phone company and had the call answered in Noida," she says. "But there is such a huge difference in the quality of service. I could hear kids laughing and giggling in the back, and I needed to get to an important work meeting right away."

Since the late 1990s, when cheap Internet telephony made it possible for U.S. companies to outsource their call centers, Americans have been complaining, loudly and regularly, about the quality of service. Just last week, Delta (DAL) pulled a call center out of India because its customers said they hated the service. "The customer acceptance of call centers in foreign countries is low," Delta Chief Executive Richard Anderson told his employees in a message. "Our customers are not shy about letting us have that feedback."

Indians are speaking out, too. In India's outsourcing world, the call-center industry, which employs as many as half a million people, is bifurcated. The better-paid, better-trained, and English-speaking operators typically go right to foreign-service call centers, and the lower-paid, not as well-trained, mostly local language speaking operators stay at locally targeted call centers.

Different Worlds
The results, predictably, have been lower quality of service for Indians as they try to navigate their cell-phone plans, their credit-card bills, or their flight reservations. "It took me three years to get a job with foreign clients," says Manish Tripathi, a 24-year-old call-center worker who asked that his employer's name not be mentioned. "And the difference was vast. Every day, they trained us on the software, the computers were better, even the telephones were nicer."

It makes economic sense, of course; foreign clients pay more than Indian clients do, sometimes by as much as 50% for total contracts, which are often decided by the number of "seats" that an operator has to fill to service a contract. Some Indian call centers, especially the ones set up in rural areas for low-cost government contracts, pay as little as $75 a month to its workers. That's a respectable living for a young person in a village, but a college grad with a couple of years experience could make as much as $400 working for an English-language operator in a city.

Quality control has been an issue for many Indian call centers. With many call centers are seen as temporary jobs for college graduates looking for something better, they have higher attrition than global rates—about 50% to 60% compared with the 28% worldwide, as measured by South Africa-based Dimension. But the key issue is training and making sure the right person answers the right call, says Martin Dove, a spokesperson for Dimension Data, which surveys call centers around the world every year. "As a whole, we've seen customer satisfaction stay relatively steady," he says, citing figures that slipped only slightly from 82% in 2006 to about 80% in 2008.

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