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A new age calling

Paran Balakrishnan

How do Indians wipe out all traces of a south Asian accent when they speak to Americans living in faraway places like Arkansas or Colorado? The answer, apparently, is that they are trained to speak more slowly and enunciate each word with meticulous care.

That's an inside secret of the call centre industry (which should more correctly, be called business process outsourcing) that now employs over 200,000 people across India. That's not bad for an industry that barely came into existence about five years ago.

What's more, the frontrunners in the industry are still hiring at a furious pace and scouting in cities like Kochi, Jaipur and Coimbatore for new venues that could cut costs even further than is possible in high cost locations like Delhi and Mumbai.

Right now, the average age in the industry is around 25 but that might fall as the big companies are recruiting briskly.

The stories that circulate about the industry are already legion. Is it true that Sandeep, the young lad with one year's experience of working the phones and talking to 'plain folks' from Kansas to Minnesota, now insists on being called Sandy? And, doesn't it cause incredible spatial dislocation to work through the night talking to people who will step out onto a Manhattan street or a bylane in Toronto?

The answer is that the risks are probably exaggerated. Certainly, working in a call centre isn't everyone's idea of the perfect job. There are, almost invariably, long commutes of over an hour each from home to office and back.

What's more, a large chunk of the work takes place when it is daytime in North America. That means a long night shift when the phones could be ringing off the hook or questions could be pouring in on the Internet. But the money is good and new recruits can expect double digit starting salaries.

Ironically, though the economic slowdown in the US could be one of the best things that happened to the industry. Growth has rocketed during the last two years and one reason is that North American companies are desperately looking at cost-cutting tactics. Outsourcing the call centre work to India is an immediate hit with cash-strapped CEOs.

India, with its large English-speaking, university-educated population was an early destination for companies like GE and American Express. But the challengers are slowly catching up and realising that there's good money to be made in the fast-emerging business.

One big rival could be the Philippines, which has plenty of English-speakers and which is not as rich as some of the other countries in South East Asia. Other smaller rivals like Sri Lanka and Jamaica have started taking calls in the past year.

The most feared enemy is most probably China with its unending stream of manpower. But the Chinese are probably many years from fluency in English.

However, they could tackle questions that come by Internet and capture one segment of the market. Are there any barriers to entry in this business? One two-wheeler giant has just announced that it is making a big splash in the call centre business and it will be spending on a mega centre that will be able to take thousands of calls at a time.

But it is already clear that only the big fish are doing well. Companies like Daksh and Spectramind are forging ahead, because they've got the right client mix and they've grown fast but carefully.

But countless smaller firms which have opened call centres are now languishing for want of customers. It is, in fact, a much tougher business than it looks.

In this brutally competitive industry, keeping costs to the bone is imperative. In Britain, the call centre flowered briefly in places like the Midlands where jobs were in short supply. Today, the business has moved on to Third World countries like India and the Philippines.

The top Indian companies are lean, mean organisations but they are also constantly searching for ways to cut costs even further because that's the only way to survive.

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