Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

 

In this age of globalization, it is getting kind of’ hard to imagine that any business or industry whatsoever, is going to remain the exclusive purview of any specific country.

 

If that were true, only the U.S. would be manufacturing semiconductors or developing software, Germany producing automobiles, Japan creating affordable entertainment electronic gizmos and the Swiss retaining their hegemony over the market for watches all over the world.

 

But that’s not the way it has worked has it?

 

Over the years, and in the early ‘90s, Japan got into reverse-engineering U.S.-developed chips and circuits and threw open a whole new market for semiconductors and CPUs. That led to PCs becoming a truly commodity item because that is what cost the most. She got into automobile manufacturing and blew the lid off the market, not just in the U.S. but on a global scale. The manufacturing juggernaut wasn’t done yet. From pocket calculators to advanced computers, from portable televisions to wide-screens, from twin-cassette boom boxes, hi-fidelity music systems to professional music mixer consoles –Japan did it all. And everyone across the whole wide world bought into it, albeit grudgingly.

 

And it was simple as to why we did. It was pure and simple economics. Japanese products were ``affordable’’ to the common man and offered a cost-effective alternative to the higher-browed products from the so-called ``pedigreed’’ manufacturers. ``What you can do, we can, if not better, and that too at a much, much cheaper price,’’ was the Japanese motto and it worked like to the tune of trillions of export dollars. Until Taiwan, South Korea and more recently, China happened that is! These countries use the engineering talent they have in their mainland and at much lower costs…even cheaper. We have bought into that too, didn’t we?

 

Today, LG Electronics and Samsung from South Korea are world-leading corporations in the sphere of electronics, and Daewoo, the beleaguered auto manufacturer was acquired by none other than General Motors of the U.S. Yet another South Korean auto major, Hyundai Motor Manufacturing Alabama, LLC (HMMA) manufactures some 200,000 cars a year and employs 2,500 automotive professionals. This $1.1 billion automotive plant is Hyundai’s first assembly and manufacturing plant in the United States and one of the most advanced assembly plants in North America. If these aren’t examples of the realities of globalization, what is?

 

You must be wondering by now as to where all this is coming from considering this column is meant for Contact Center Analysis. Let me explain. Much like the PC and electronics boom in the ‘90s was ignited by low cost manufacturing in South Asia, outsourced software development and IT-enabled services became the major industry in India in the late ‘90s.

 

Given the sky-rocketing cost of manpower, infrastructure and real estate in the U.S. and Europe, it was but a logical strategy on the part of the corporations in these countries to look for lower cost alternatives. India, with its vast pool of technically skilled manpower that possesses an uncanny ability to create and write software code, yes in English, just happened to be at the right place at the right time. A recent report released jointly by the National Association for Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) and McKinsey states that exports by the Indian IT/ITES and BPO sectors would touch $60 billion by March, 2010.

 

The report pegs the world’s addressable market for software and outsourced services at $300 billion (IT-related services accounting for between $150 billion and $180 billion, and BPO services for between $120 billion and $150 billion) and that India currently commands a 10 percent share of the pie.  

 

Even for a weather-beaten journalist like me, one that has written on the ICT industry since the early ‘80s, these are impressive stats. But the growth of the outsourced software and ITES industries can still be rationally explained and nothing in the world has surprised me more than the explosive growth in the outsourced call center business to this part of the world! I would be the first to proudly admit that we in India are great at software design and coding, but customer care and support on a global scale? Now that’s a different ball game altogether!

 

The fact is that unlike in the case of affordable or even cheap electronics or IT products, or high quality and often complex software development at lower costs, the global corporate world has bought into this syndrome. And now for most U.S. and European corporations, it has become a classic case of holding the Bengal Tiger by its tail! But outsourcing software development or getting a million lines of code written and generated is one thing, and expecting a whole new generation in the country to solve, resolve and address marketing and sales issues demanded by the populace of the world at large, quite another. Indians do understand, comprehend and communicate in the English language, but to expect personnel in call centers here to perfectly redress each and every query -- and that too in American, British or Australian English – is a classic case of shooting at the proverbial pie in the sky! So who exactly is to blame? We’ll get to that issue a bit later.

I read Susan J. Campbell’s column on `` Indian Call Center Agents Suffering Health Problems Due to Caller Abuse’’ with interest, as I did with Al Bredenberg’s take on the remedial actions that Indian call centers seem to be prescribing to handle abusive callers…or receivers. But what I studied -- with consternation and a sense of trepidation – were the hundreds of blogs posted all over cyber space dismissing at best and berating at worst, experiences with so-called ``Indian call centers’’. The common thread was that companies such as Dell, GE Capital, Citibank and American Express among others, had ``realized their folly’’ and decided to move their customer care call center operations back to the U.S.   

 

Like most industry analysts here, I believe that India should move out of the voice market…if not totally, at least in the B2C space. There’s a solid reason behind that premise and it came from a voice/accent trainer (name withheld on request) of one of India’s largest BPO call centers based in NOIDA, in the state of Uttar Pradesh.

 

According to her, the basic problems of communication – accent neutralization or naturalization notwithstanding – arise when dealing with individual customers in the U.S. or Britain, and not individuals representing corporations. ``To address a mass market, there has to be a deep cultural knowledge of the domain, but in the technical sphere it could be a matter of resolving a serious corporate-level technical problem wherein the receiver is technically-proficient and the caller may not necessarily be patient, but a lot more understanding’’.

 

In such cases, problem-resolution is often painlessly executed through calls, e-mails and fax to the satisfaction of both parties. Simply put, if you’re in the voice business, it’s safer in the outsourced world to be in the B2B arena and not dabbling in trying to help first-time consumers plug computers, rebooting the computer and re-starting Windows, or explaining the route to Bath in Somerset, England!  

 

Just this week I scoured the weekly employment supplement that accompanies one of the leading dailies and was yet again, shaken out of my semi-somnolent stage by the sheer number of ads that exhorted the barely-out-of-school kids to join the ever-burgeoning call center business. In fact one of them claimed there were 5,000 openings available and I quote, ``International – 3,000 Customer Support; 2,000 Technical Support.’’! There were others that seduced potential candidates with the lure of working for MNCs ``at MNC salaries’’.

 

New markets when opened do go through their phase of idiocy and stupidity. Remember what happened during the dot.com boom the world over? And that’s exactly what is happening in India with regard to the outsourced call center industry in the country. And on the flip side of the coin, this fire is being fanned by corporations all over the world that want to cut down on their marketing, sales, support and telecommunications overheads – without focusing on issues such as training and orientation.

 

As the trainer from the Indian BPO says, ``the key would be for the companies giving out these call center outsourcing projects to be wholly responsible for transfer of knowledge pertaining to their services or products, invest in initial training and orientation and then expect results. Also, the call center industry requires due diligence processes from the principals’ end on a regular basis, which doesn’t seem to happen.’’

 

The already difficult situation isn’t helped any by the extremely high manpower attrition in the call center business wherein the manpower replacement costs are huge. ``It’s not just about getting new batches of candidates to be trained on the voice process for new clients or growing business with existing ones. It is also about plugging in greenhorns at the expense of the more experienced ones. And that is what really throws the spanner in the works!’’

 

Personally, I am convinced that market-related corrections happen over a period of time. They have in the past, and this purported reality is no different. However, before signing off, there was just this one thought – it would be great in case CTI software developers thought of building true-speech voice filters that would take any input from the speaker (voice or text) – wherever she may be in the world – and convert it to the preferred accent of the caller’s choice. Vendors of this technology could make a killing.

 

Artificial Intelligence doesn’t necessarily have to be the purview of Hollywood!

 

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