The new buzzword in the IT sector is the outsourcing of work to less-developed countries on the grounds that it would "reduce costs" (i.e. not having to pay US workers at US rates with US taxes and carrying a US pension fund). India has become the stereotypical place American workers refer to when telling their opinions, mostly because it really is the place that a lot of American IT jobs are going. In this example, it is customer support call centers.
Looks like the Utopia the corporate hacks embraced may not be quite the solution they thought it would be. I hope the whole thing blows up in their corporate CEO faces.
Different world, same old stress
India's call-center workers are productive, educated and work cheaply - but they still get stressed.
By SCOTT BARANCIK, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published September 3, 2003
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India was supposed to be the call-center industry's Promised Land.
Workers there have undergraduate or master's degrees. They speak excellent English. They consider $1-an-hour wages just great. They don't expect health insurance.
And unlike their U.S. counterparts, more than half of whom quit every year, Indian workers are said to consider their call-center jobs a career.
Not surprisingly, companies like Tampa's Sykes Enterprises and Cincinnati's Convergys Corp. have led a gradual exodus of thousands of jobs from rural America to cities such as Bangalore, India's answer to Silicon Valley. They say their clients - Sykes' include Delta Air Lines, MSN.com and credit-card issuer Providian Financial Corp. - love the reduced rates.
But according to a survey of 1,084 Indian call-center workers from 19 companies, conducted on the sly at local parks, cafes and private homes, the employees are starting to feel more like characters in the Stepford Wives than The Ten Commandments:
Forced to work odd hours to accommodate the American business day, Indian workers find they are estranged from their families and friends, eating poorly, and stressed out by the unending calls from sometimes abusive customers.
The typical Indian worker is required to Americanize his name, change his accent and study American sports and popular culture. What may seem novel at first often adds to his sense of alienation from Indian society.
Indian call-center workers, most of them recent university graduates in their early 20s, tend to be ambitious but overqualified for their sometimes monotonous jobs. Many are frustrated to discover how few management slots are available. Not too different from American college grads, eh?
What Indian workers like best about call centers is the wages. In fact, many have begun moving from one center job to another for just a few pennies more per hour. Poaching is so bad that some Indian companies are beginning to sign bilateral nonaggression pacts.
The result: annual attrition rates have reached an estimated 30 percent to 50 percent per year, far more than U.S. call-center companies anticipated.
"I think in the long run, you need to look at who you're hiring," said Abraham Karimpanal, the survey's author and an assistant general manager at market research firm NFO India. "You're not going to sustain their aspirations for long."
Call center executives can't expect much sympathy from U.S. employees they've laid off. But they are painfully aware of the high turnover rates in India, especially given the high costs of training new workers.
"Attrition is the same problem worldwide, and anyone that thought it was going to be any different in India would be horribly surprised," said Dennis Ross, general manager of offshore operations at Convergys Corp., the world's largest call-center company. The Cincinnati company has 48,000 employees, including 5,100 in India and 7,400 in Florida.
Ross blamed much of the turnover in India on nighttime work hours. "The biological and physiological changes cannot be underestimated," he said.
To ease the problem, Convergys discusses job stress during worker orientations, offers healthy meals at its free cafeterias, allows workers to rotate shifts or answer customer e-mails when possible, and, at one center, opened an in-house cappuccino bar. Free door-to-door transportation is a standard benefit.
In addition, Ross said the company tries to place engineers and other accomplished hires in more challenging jobs, such as technical support for a software product. Management slots are few "so when a position does indeed become available, competition is intense," Ross said.
Convergys' long-term plan: open some call centers in smaller Indian towns, where education, competition and wage pressures are not so high. So, if I read that right, they're looking for less educated people willing to work for less money. Isn't that just barely a step up from illiterats on the phone? That's precisely the model that Sykes Enterprises and many of its competitors followed domestically in the 1990s. Ross said Convergys will wait until telephone service in rural India improves some, though. Bwahaahaahaahaa! You're killin' me, man!
Other companies are experimenting with retention methods. Like U.S. dot-com companies before it, one hired a "chief fun officer" to organize group activities and "make sure everyone is feeling good and happy," said Karimpanal, the study's author. Others are letting some employees celebrate Indian holidays with their families by switching calls to non-Indian centers. So, US companies outsource to Indian companies, who outsource to .... say, wasn't this a Dilbert comic recently? And where do I go to apply for the Chief Fun Officer position?
The key, Karimpanal said, may be to hire less-educated, less-motivated workers who have fewer employment options Like, say indentured servants? . The same lesson is likely to apply in today's other call-center hot spots, including the Philippines and Costa Rica.
Workers who were surveyed by NFO India, a subsidiary of NFO WorldGroup of Greenwich, Conn., included employees of Convergys Corp., India's TransWorks Information Services and other providers of outsourced customer support. Researchers also interviewed employees at companies such as General Electric, American Express and Citigroup, as well as industry psychologists and human resources directors. Employees of Sykes Enterprises, which opened its first Indian center a year ago, were not interviewed.
The unexpected attrition problem is not deterring growth plans at Convergys, which will open its third Indian call center next week. Despite the risks, taking customer calls overseas remains a bargain.
"We've not slowed down," Ross said. Best of luck when customer sat ratings are in the trash can.
