India's Outsourcing Boom Runs Into Trouble

http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=1428299

Very interesting

 

Yes, interesting.
As the number of foreign inmigrants increases in Britain and other European countries though, I think that the need to have the same culture as the callers will be less of an issue with time.

As for moving to India, guess it could be an adventure for the younger people, but I wonder what the pay and medical care is like over there...

 

But why the need to move to India if somebody wants to work for an Indian call center? I have seen employment ads here in Australia where one can do the calling from the comfort of one's own home. The company supplies the phone etc and off you go.

The real problem is probably the salaries that are being paid to the poor call center slaves in India ( and other places). It is a thankless job, needing a very tough hide given the number of times they have to deal with phones being slammed down and possibly abusive callee's at the other end of the line. I heard that Indian call centers have a very high employee turn over rate, and that is understandable.

So, on top of not having enough capable candidates, they also have very high exit rates to deal with.

There is also the problem of their telephone lines. I can usually tell by the length of time it takes for the person to respond to me and the crackling background noise when I pick up the phone, that it is a call from India. Just enough for me to hang up before they get the chance to say with a heavy Indian accent, from a location that seems very deep down a well, "Hello, my name is Kevin Miles"....yeah, right, and mine is Rupinder Ghandi.

My heart truly bleeds for those Indian call centers' staffing problems.

 

So manybe the ball will bounce back and the Indian call centers will have to sub-outsource their business to home workers in Europe and America...

 

The technology of self servicing, voice and speech recognition etc, one day will reduce the number s people that work in call centers .

We will need people but the IVR's and other intelligent routing application will run locally, there won't be a need to send it to other countries.

Some prefer to speak to machine than a human that they cant understand.

Learner

 

Such technology is already being applied.

I've had a few calls where a recorded vioce cheerfully announces that I'm a lucky winner to a seminar where I will be wined and dined while I get brainwashed into buying an overpriced apartment in Bermuda, or similar questionable wonderful deals. In such cases I feel even happier just hanging up.

 

From first hand experience I can say that, at least here in Spain, a lot of people who call call centers like doing it partly to hear and talk to another human, sometimes to express their emotions (rage, desperation, confusion, doubt, indignation, etc.)

There are already many robot systems answering phones in some banks here. The other tendency I've observed is that, whereas maybe five years ago many of the customer service lines were toll free numbers, now most of them are expensive numbers, some very expensive. Also in general, at least in the airline / airport biz I've been involved with, it's quite chaotic. For example, if you lose your luggage you are screwed because it is very very difficult to get through the phone numbers set up for that purpose at some airline companies (lack of sufficient personel).

In general the move to cut down costs has worsened customer service a lot. Sometimes I just don't know how customers take all this abuse. Probably in the US it's much better.

All the above is related to local call centers. Can't imagine what it will be like when more and more are taken to Morocco and South America (the outsource destination for Spanish language calls).

 

It's all the same here in Australia.

Customer service has deteriorated to the point of it having become customer-non-service.

So, even though a lot of money is being saved by companies outsourcing, it seems that companies couldn't care less about customers and would rather that this annoying species became extinct, while at the same time spending as much money as possible buying their products and, dare I say it, non-service. Something has to break in the end ....

 

There's an interesting system dynamic in play here.

The cost of American IT labor reached a Tipping Point point due to technology adoption and American economics.

Now the Indian economy shows signs of reaching a similar Tipping Point for analogous reasons.

This "overshoot and collapse" cycle is getting faster and faster. It used to take a generation (Steel, automotive, etc.) but now appears to happen inside of a decade.

 

india wont last

there is so much that they will do

they will have problems with pakistan and kashmir..there is instability in the region that the jobs will come back here ...

 

Re: india wont last

Yes, but what about CHINA?

 

Re: india wont last

India may have problems, but Kashmir is no longer one of them. The region has stabilized greatly over the past two years since India and Pakistan began a round of diplomacy. Violence is down, trade links are up. India is cutting troop levels.

 

Re: Re: india wont last

Have you read any Chinese-produced English-language technical documents lately? It ain't pretty.

India has the advantage of having been part of the British Empire - it speaks English. China's software industry will become robust, but will disadvantaged when attempting to enter English speaking markets. Software engineering requires proficiency in English.

For the sake of competing in areas in which it enjoys comparative advantage - cheap labor - China will stick to manufacturing.