Indian Call Centers – Are they following the Quality Standards?

By now everyone probably knows what a Call Center is. To be brief, a Call Center is an office which is engaged in receiving and/or making calls to customers or clients from different national or foreign locations, for business purposes. It is also defined as a Contact Center which receives and answers calls or requests of a particular service provided by a third party or the first party service provider.

Indian is the proud owner of the largest share of the Call Center industry of the world. There are big IT giants who have taken up Call Center Services provision as a main stream business. Companies like WIPRO, Infosys, Convergys, IBM, etc have set up large Call Centers all across India and they serve Fortune 500 clients like Delta Airlines, AOL, etc.

When the whole concept of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) was developed, India was the most favorite destination for the European and American companies because of certain feasibilities that India provided. Cheap labor, Better technology, High level of intelligence, better and faster adaptability of foreign language and culture, and the capability of working in odd continuous hours were the major reasons India was seen as the best destination for Outsourcing.

For India it was a boon as youngsters found a new career option. Even undergraduates started getting jobs which paid highly. Call Centers in India mushroomed rapidly.
More and more business started coming to India. With growing inflow of business from US and UK, there posed a new problem for Indian Call Centers. The biggest problem that India has is the ability of an average graduate’s spoken English. There is a typical Indianism in the accent and grammar of Indian English speaking crowd. However, intensive training programs organized by Call Centers have been helpful in minimizing this problem, but still it is becoming more and more difficult to follow the Quality Benchmark demanded by the overseas client as far as the accent is concerned. This communication issue has resulted into increasing complains by the end customers.
Other than the top players in the Call Center market, most of the international call centers in India fail to cope up with this problem of communication skill impairment. Many Centers have lost business because of their lack of effective communication skills.

Another issue which the Indian International Call Centers are facing is of attrition. Since this is a highly paid job in India, most of the employees of call centers skip jobs in a jiffy. The Indian Centers have not been able to maintain Employee Satisfaction norms and benchmarks resulting in attrition. Another aspect of attrition is the incapability of the employees to adhere to quality standards inked in the SLAs by the clients. Since youngsters of India have still not taken Call Center job as a serious career, they leave the jobs at the drop of a hat. Indian orthodox families also play a major role in the attrition issue. Night shifts for women or girls are still considered unacceptable by most Indian families.

All these issues adversely hit the provision of quality service by the Call Center. Continual recruitment and training does not help in maintaining quality standards because of the attrition issue. Indian Call Centers have to address this issue as early as possible to still hold on to the biggest market share of the BPO Industry. A central body of all Indian Contact Centers should be established to address issues pertaining to administrative, operational and attrition.
A no-poaching agreement should be jointly signed by all contact centers to prohibit employees jumping jobs.
Intensive and extensive training roadmap should be prepared to solve the communication problem.
Recruitment should be rationalized to acquire better and most suitable employees.

In all, it is high time that Indian Call Centers take steps to improve quality standards or there are other emerging countries to provide better services available.

Linus Orakles
http://www.authorclub.info/