India's Call-Center Jobs Go Begging

[RamboLiberal]

Call Centers are symbols of India's economic boom. With Anglicized names and feigned Western accents, Indians handle credit card problems and troubleshoot computers, collect debts and conduct customer satisfaction surveys. Over the past decade or so, relatively high salaries in the call center sector have attracted thousands of applicants across the country. But now the boom is going bust because India's college graduates and young job seekers just don't want to be bothered with the business anymore.

Young people say it is no longer worthwhile going through sleepless nights serving customers halfway around the world. They have better job opportunities in other fields. The work is tiring and stressful and offers few career advancement opportunities, says Dr. A. Sankara Reddy, head of Sri Venkateswara College in New Delhi. In response to students' complaints, Reddy said the college a few months ago banned call center recruiters from campus. At least a handful of other local colleges over the last few years have made the same decision.

The complaints come at a time when the Indian information technology sector, which includes companies that run call centers and do other outsourced work like medical transcription and claims processing, is facing a dearth of skilled labor. Many are opening back offices in other developing countries. India faces a potential shortage of 500,000 professional employees in the information technology sector by 2010, according to the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM), a trade group.

Although the country produces hundreds of thousands of graduates each year, many lack the skills — in some cases, fluency in English — to be employed. The industry is also facing "intense competition" for workers from the retail and airline and hospitality sectors, where wages are now closer to what call centers pay, said Kiran Karnik, president of NASSCOM. As India expands its share of more sophisticated outsourcing like financial analysis and product research and development, Karnik said competition for choice employees is also growing. "As recently as four years back, the choice was pretty clear," Karnik said. "Either you got a high paying, good job at a call center or no job at all. Today, not only are there other options, but they are pretty close to the call centers (in terms of salaries)."

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1671982,00.html

[Deja Q]

1. Just like here in America, except we're seeing future jobs go to India.

Americans are called lazy, don't ask me why as we've all read the news articles saying how, in the developed world, Americans are the hardest working. It's no small wonder more Americans are tired of the games, which in turn reduces interest; who wants to go into even more debt?)

Never mind the quality of Indian call centers was beneath a layer of cesspool fodder. So many complaints from people about linguistic, cultural, intellectual, and temporal differences. (Can't talk/hear correctly, arguments, the quality can't even surpass a cue card!, and some Americans had to endure calls at 11PM or later because of the time zone differential and never mind the amount of "Would you repeat that please?" on both sides that slows everyone down... assuming the Indian gets the job right (and plenty of times, despite repeating things, they still don't get it done right))

So what's India's excuse for ditching the arena?

And how does that reflect on those higher paying jobs being filtered in?

:nopity:

[cosmik debris]

2. For what its worth

A computer company(Dell I think) just closed a call center in McGregor Texas, about 15 miles from Crawford Texas.

[varun]

3. There are many in India willing to take up these jobs

So the city kids in Delhi and Bangalore find this beneath their dignity?

There are millions of others looking for these jobs in India. The call centers will just move to less developed areas of the country.

[DavidMS]

4. It doesn't suprise me

Especially for some of the higher level IT support call centers. I once had to call one about a server configuration issue and was not at all impressed. The various people I spoke with were not familiar with the product line and were unable to satisfactorily resolve my issue and were also unable to escalate it to an engineer or software developer who could have fixed the software that shipped with the machine.

Also, given the market pressure, I would not be surprised if even with efforts to move call centers to cheaper places, it won't make a difference because the language and technical skills may not be present.

I understand that many call centers are being moved to rural areas in the US, which is not a bad economic development program.

[Skittles]

5. they lack more than just English skills

as someone who deals with them daily I find that all too often commen sense is lacking too :o

[Lydia Leftcoast]

6. I've had problems with Indian call center operators working for airlines who

don't know the names of U.S. cities and forget to account for the International Dateline when booking flights. Forget it if your situation is at all complicated, because the employees there sometimes do not understand English or American culture well enough to understand why you have an unusual situation, and even if they did, they don't have the authority to do anything about it.

When I had passport delay problems this summer, I decided not to try the airline's Indian call center at all but to go to the airport and speak to a customer service rep face to face. As a result, I was shoe-horned onto another flight without a change fee.