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The Indian Call Center Journey

            

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Future Prospects

The Indian call center majors were trying to handle the labor exodus through various measures. Foremost amongst these was the move to employ people from social and academic backgrounds different from the norms set earlier. Young people passing out of English medium high schools and universities and housewives and back-to-work mothers looking for suitable opportunities were identified as two of the biggest possible recruitment pools for the industry. Such students with a good basic level of English could be trained easily to improve their accents, pronunciation, grammar, spelling and diction. They could be trained to become familiar with western culture and traditions. The housewives and back-to-work mothers' pool could also be developed into excellent resources. This had been successfully tried out in the US and European markets, where call centers employed a large number of housewives and back-to-work mothers.

Another solution being thought about was to recruit people from non-metros, as people from these places were deemed to be more likely to stay with the organization, though being more difficult to recruit and expensive to train. Even as the people and infrastructure problems were being tackled, a host of other issues had cropped up, posing threats for the Indian call centers.

The promise of cheap, English speaking and technically aware labor from India was suddenly not as lucrative in the international markets. A survey of Fortune 1,000 companies on their outsourcing concerns showed that cost-reduction was not the most important criterion for selecting an outsourcing partner. This did not augur well for a country banking on its cost competitiveness.

Also, China was fast emerging as a major threat to India, as it had embarked on a massive plan to train people in English to overcome its handicap in the language. In February 2001, Niels Kjellerup, editor and publisher of 'Call Center Managers Forum' came out strongly against India being promoted as an ideal place to set up call centers. He said: "The English spoken by Indians is a very heavy dialect – in fact, in face to face conversations, I found it very difficult to understand what was said. How will this play out over the telephone with people much less educated that my conversation partners? The non-existent customer service culture in India will make training of reps mandatory and difficult, since such a luxury as service is not part of everyday life in India.

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