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Irate calls are a mainstay of customer service work in any country. Experts believe centres in India became targets of a vicious campaign a couple of years ago when the US economy took a nosedive. The stress caused by abusive calls is seen as one of the reasons for high attrition rates at call centers. A look at how BPOs are coping with it.
India is fast emerging as a knowledge economy. The spectacular performance in the IT sector has helped the country's offshoring sector emerge as the world's largest and fastest growing. Analyst predicts that by 2007-08 the BPO industry workforce will consist of 1.45 million to 1.55 million people and the industry will account for 7 per cent of India's GDP. The industry doles out handsome salaries, as high as Rs 8,000-20,000 even to fresh graduates. But there is cause for concern as well. Youngsters who have ditched campuses soon realise that the fine print of prosperity disguises the parallel damage-both psychological and physical. A recent trend of abuse from British and American customers is driving increasing numbers of Indian call centre workers from their jobs. It is accepted that irate and rude customers are nothing new, but it is the racial overtones that are shocking the young and eager call centre professionals in India's Business Processing Outsourcing (BPO) industry. Workers face a spectrum of rudeness - from sexual harassment to fury at unsolicited sales calls, to open racism. Industry analysts have seen the phenomenon of racist clients grow in recent years, as customers in the UK and the US become increasingly sensitive to the political issue of jobs outsourced to India. These stress factors generated by clients' rude and abusive behaviour are also affecting the normal social conduct of call centre employees. Many firms are faced with high attrition rates due to the psycho-social costs to the employee. The reason for all this is obvious. Countries like the US and the UK have lost thousands of technical jobs to India and according to some estimates, the number of Americans calling themselves IT professionals has decreased by nearly 160,000. Several web sites have sprung up in the US to cater to phone abusers with phone numbers of Indian call centres and Hindi swear words. In some cases customers refuse to deal with the call centre employee when they find out they are working in an Indian call centre. Others say they have been verbally abused and accused of taking jobs from Europe or the US. According to consultancy firm Forrester, outsourcing is expected to move 3.4 million US service-sector jobs overseas by 2015. In the United Kingdom, hundreds of people are not getting IT jobs even though an estimated 19,000 low-paid Indian techies continue to flood into the country every year. Moreover, staff turnover is a major problem, with some companies battling an annual departure rate of 60-70 per cent, organisations are taking radical steps to help staff to deal with abuse. In recent months some firms have decided to provide psychological support to their workers. More organisations have started to let staff hang up on persistently rude customers (formerly a sackable offence), after warning them three times to mind their language. Trainers try to help new staff understand the different cultural forms of rudeness they are likely to encounter. As long as the cost advantage remains, a bulk of outsourcing jobs is destined to move to India. According to an interim report of the Task Force on HRD in IT, more than 200,000 post-graduates, 700,000 graduates and 800,000 diploma holders in IT and related areas would be added to the Indian system by 2008 -- majority of them looking for what the west considers to be low-paid, back-end jobs.
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