India: An avenue for Outsourcing.

It’s no real secret that Call Centers have been taking off in India at an amazing rate. It is also well known that many companies have shifted their growth from, or are in the process of shutting down Call Centers in Philippines in favor of Call Centers based in India.

One key reason that Indian based call centers do so well is that the call center agents have such a neutral accent. Many of us have been on the phone with a call center agent in the India and did not even know. Frankly, that’s just how good many are.

Recently, I had a technical support problem with a piece of computer networking equipment and called the technical support line for assistance. When I reached the agent, I was sure I was speaking to someone in the United States. If I had not lived in the India myself, I probably would have missed a phrase that was spoken by the agent that is fairly unique to India. The expression was “for a while”, which in American colloquialism means “just a sec”.

Through a fairly detailed technical discussion, it was not obvious to me that I was speaking with someone outside of the country. To get through a conversation like that without me picking up on it is actually quite an achievement. As you and I know, but many call center companies seem to miss, conversation is more than just understanding and verbalizing the language. There are nuances and conversational styles and cultural clues embedded in a conversation.

The educational system in India more closely mirrors that of the U.S. My experience with quite a few Philippine based call centers has not quite been the same. It is pretty much understood when I speak to someone in an Philippine based call center that the person I speak with is reading a script. When I go off script, it is easy to tell that they are getting confused and hunting through other scripts trying to figure out what to say in response. When the centers first started in Philippines, I could generally understand their accents. Now I have the advantage of having also lived in Philippines for over four years so my understanding of their accents is probably better than the average person on the end of a phone in the United States.

With that said, I must confess that even I have had difficulty understanding some call center agents in Philippines. Additionally, I find that I have to repeat myself in order for them to understand me. Typically, my approach is to spend as little time as possible in this position and ask to speak to a supervisor pretty quickly. Generally, the supervisor has a somewhat better command of the language, which is what got them promoted in the first place.

When one considers other types of work being done offshore of late, it occurs to me that the experience with call centers should easily translate into other services having the potential to be delivered with a higher level of quality.

What I can report is that the U.S. customer base we served almost never cited communications or misunderstanding of requirements as an issue. I am certainly not saying we never had issues, but communication and not being able to understand each other in phone discussion or email were not problems that came up.

I would encourage anyone considering diversifying their offshore strategy or looking to begin offshoring of call center, software application development/maintenance, or BPO to take a closer look at India.