Africa a call center alternative to India?

WASHINGTON: Some US lawmakers and think tanks believe that Africa can be a much cheaper alternative to call centers in India.

The issue came up briefly for discussion during a Congressional hearing on US-Africa Trade relations.

"Is there any possibility of having call centers in Africa, in your opinion?" asked Congressman Donald Payne, at the joint hearing convened by Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.

"I don't know whether that has been explored," said Karen Tandy, senior vice president, public affairs and communications, Motorola.

"However, it makes sense that it is certainly possible in Africa," she said.

"There are a tremendous number of entrepreneurs springing up throughout the continent that we are also investing and giving grant money to and technology, so there is no reason why a call center couldn't be part of the future in Africa," Tandy said.

"I would echo that," observed Greg Lebedev, adviser to the president US Chamber of Commerce and Chairman, Center for International Private Enterprise. Africa has a wonder resource of English language speakers, he added.

"Certainly, there is some market maturation in India right now and one could argue there might be cost-competitive advantages in Africa. So I think that, to your point and to Tandy's point, that's a sensible area in which to look," Lebedev said.

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How to Be a Good Customer Care Executive?

As customer service representatives are the key strength for any successful organization, and keep you connect with your potential customers. So customer care executives should have excellent verbal and interpersonal skills, including being receptive to other's views and opinions.

In the recent time, it can be difficult to provide excellent customer service for each of the calls, especially when they have to deal with angry customers who might had to wait on hold for an hour or more before they even reach you. Often, the customer care executives will only have to answer the phone to listen to an immediate escalation of a customer angry voice.

Its very tempting to put on the defensive, it's much better to let the customer continues to say what I mean. Angry customers who feel as if they were really being listened cooled off faster than customers who think that the customer care representative is not really concerned about their needs.
Customers who are angry are going to blame anyone for the problem they have, do not take it personally, instead, ensure them that their struggle has been ended now and issues will be resolved at the earliest. It is the responsibility of customer care representatives to make their customers happy and satisfied before hang up the phone.

It is important to realize that the customer believes s\he is talking to the particular company. they are unaware or not interested that they are talking with a very good lady named Gelsey or some one else who has her own family problems. All they know is that they have a problem and you caused it, that's why want to know what to do about it from your end. And this is you responsibilities to resolve all their issues till hang up the phone.. All customers don't h same type of attitude, many customers are very nice and just have a question about your service.

The key, however to provide best customer service, in spite of the situation is completely focused on the customer who is talking. Customer Service Representative is the key person who represent the image of any organization, and help the company to make a faith in the eyes of your business assets i.e Customers. If a customer has angered hard before, you should be able to let go of the anger before speaking to the next customer or notice through the call.

Source:http://www.callcentersindia.com/

India's Phone Centers Take Calls From Home

In Shift, Outsourcers Tap Domestic Market as U.S. Demand Ebbs

HUBLI, India -- With the U.S. in recession, India's call centers have opened a new outsourcing frontier: India.

The shift is a sign of how India's flagship export industry is shifting from providing services to the developed world to catering to its own, quickly growing market. The Indian economy grew 6.7% for the fiscal year ended March 31.

While outsourcing revenue from within India is still a tiny fraction of the global market -- $12 billion in 2008 out of $500 billion spent world-wide -- it is expected to hit $95 billion by 2020, or nearly 15% of the expected global market, according to a recent McKinsey & Co. report. The overall global market for business process outsourcing will reach $640 billion in the same time, the report says.

Indian outsourcers capture contracts from U.S. clients largely by touting India's low wages and big cost savings. But at home, providing those lower costs means setting up offices in rural areas, where wages and property costs are lower than in its bigger cities.

"We cannot deliver and make money in the same way we make money for an international market," says Ananda Mukerji, chief executive of Firstsource Solutions Ltd., a Mumbai-based outsourcer.

In April 2007, his company opened a call center in Hubli, a city of 800,000 people 370 kilometers northwest of Bangalore, India's outsourcing capital. Hubli is best known for its cotton and peanut farms.

But it is also a place where wages and rents are half of those in major cities such as Mumbai. A call center worker who gets roughly $500 a month in Mumbai would earn $250 to $300 a month in Hubli.

Firstsource now has 450 workers in Hubli, where it is the largest private employer. It is one of the company's 15 outsourcing centers for the domestic market. During the past two years Firstsource has seen the India share of its annual revenue, which stood at $370 million in the year ended March 31, jump to 13% from 1%.

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Delta Air Ends Use of India Call Centers

Delta Air Lines Inc. said Friday it has stopped using India-based call centers to handle sales and reservations, making it the latest U.S. company to decide the cost benefits of directing calls offshore are outweighed by the backlash from customers.

Delta said it stopped routing calls to India-based call centers over the first three months of the year. Customers had complained they had trouble communicating with Indian agents, the airline said. Last month, Chrysler LLC said it would move its customer-service center back from India.

"It is fundamentally cheaper to do it in India, but there's also the question of whether it's better to do it cheaper or better to do it better in terms of the relationship with your customers," said Ben Trowbridge, chief executive of Alsbridge Inc., a Dallas-based company that advises on outsourcing.

Call-center representatives in India earn roughly $500 a month, or about one-sixth the salary of their U.S.-based counterparts, he added.

Delta's move also reflects the need for airlines to streamline their sales and reservation operations as customer-call volume dwindles amid the ongoing recession. And, as layoffs mount in the U.S., it could be a smart public-relations move for companies to cut their outsourced business before eliminating payroll positions.

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Bangladesh is also want his share of pie from multi billion Call Centre industry

Bangladesh is also planning to have first of its own telephone based call center in country. The ministry and the corporate figures of country is amazed by the growth and the wealth generated by its neighbour India by this Call Centre, BPO industry.

Licenses for the countries first-ever telephone call centres are soon to be issued, holding out the prospect that Bangladesh will soon join the billion dollar global business. High officials at Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) said they hoped to issue the first licenses as early as this month, and were asking prospective licensees to contact them in order to finalise licensing policy.

The move to set up call centres in the country has been prompted by the regulator's belief that a ''financial revolution' will be possible in Bangladesh if the country allows the speedy development of the Information Communications and Telecommunications sector. Bangladesh is lagging behind in the lucrative call centre business, at a time when its neighbour India is earning billions of dollars from call centre business. India has been able to attract multinational companies who are keen to lower costs by outsourcing customer call centres in countries with low labour costs.

Banks, computer companies and telecom groups have taken advantage of the opportunity. Bangladesh has the advantage of offering even lower labour costs, however the weakness of spoken English in comparison to India is a draw back. As per the BTRC plan there is restriction on how many call centres would be established. The license will be given to individuals or companies or joint venture companies, formed under Bangladesh law on nonexclusive basis.

But if any individual or company likely to setting up both domestic and overseas operation, separate license would be required for international and domestic services, according to draft proposal of BTRC. The BTRC posted the draft call centre policy in its website (www.btrc.gov.bd) so that prospective operators can share their views in policy making. Anybody can put his or her suggestions until February, 16 through e-mail.

The prospective operators can have multiple call centres under a single license. But the location with number of agents and client details will have to be registered with BTRC before operation. A call centre is a physical place where customer and other telephone calls are handled by an organisation, usually with some amount of computer automation. Typically, a call centre has the ability to handle a considerable volume of calls at the same time, to screen calls and forward them to someone qualified to handle them, and to log calls.

Call centres are used by mail-order catalog organisations, telemarketing companies, computer product help desks, and any large organisation that uses the telephone to sell or service products and services. In a recent interview with The Daily Star Major General Manzurul Alam (retd), chairman of BTRC, said the second submarine cable is a must for expanding call centres, IP (Internet Protocol) telephony and software business.

"If we had an alternative submarine cable, Bangladesh would be a hub for the ICT outsourcing business," he said, adding that some Indian companies had already visited the BTRC office to inquire about shifting their call center business to Bangladesh.

The India's turnover of the call centres was $ 65 million in 1999-00 which increased to more than $ 10 billion in 2006. IT-enabled services have grown at a rate of 65 percent in India. Foreign companies dominate India's call centre industry, with a 60 percent share of the annual Rs 71bn ($1.5bn) turnover market.

http://callcentersindia.wordpress.com/ blog which contains very good information about call centers in India.

According to draft policy, BTRC will issue two types license--hosted call centre and hosted call centre services. The license fee ranging between Tk15, 000 and Tk50, 000 based on number of agents the call centre will have. The call centre or hosted call centre or hosted call centre service provider must not be used as a transit point of any sort. The draft call centre policy said BTRC will issue call centre license for 10 years on annual renewable basis.

Source: thedailystar.net

Technology for year 2008 for Contact Center Industry

Each year we think it’s important to track what we believe will be the key trends driving technology deployments in the contact centre industry.

What’s interesting for us is seeing how quickly some technologies move from being future trends into standard solutions that play an active role in most of the contact centres up and down the country. It wasn’t long ago, for example, that we were highlighting IP-based solutions as technologies to watch out for. Now they figure strongly in the majority of contact centre technology stacks.

So what do we see as the key technology trends for 2008? Below you’ll find a digest of our top five, plus a few words on how we see them fitting into the contact centre space.

1) ::::::: Self service that really works :::::::

A distinctive characteristic of successful voice self-service applications is that they’re always designed around caller needs. Design should be user-centric, giving the caller quick and easy access to the service they require. The most successful applications demonstrate clear user benefits, often in terms of security, privacy, convenience or cost of service. Along with delivering caller benefits, self-service solutions can also support corporate objectives around providing a consistent customer interaction and corporate image.

We’re now finding that the latest natural language-based speech technology is already making it possible for organisations to replace frustrating touch-tone systems with intelligent speech front-ends. These can speed up the customer authentication process, as well as provide a rapid and comfortable solution for transactional customer enquiries.

An example is the self-service payment solution recently implemented by BCW Group plc, a leading credit management company. Here, a speech solution has achieved payback in just six months because it gives customers a secure and discrete way of making debt payments at a time that suits them best. It’s proved a successful project, with customer usage far exceeding initial expectations.

2) ::::::: The means to find out what your customers are thinking :::::::

2007 saw the first UK roll-out of a web browser-based ‘customer feedback’ approach that we believe will significantly change the way contact operations collect and process customer feedback.

This new generation of feedback technology uses short, context-sensitive dynamic surveys to capture information from customers across a range of channels. It helps organisations make informed business decisions by capturing and analysing customer feedback - and the context in which it was provided - in real time.

It’s certainly already proving valuable for Leeds City Council, which found that traditional postal-based customer surveys were costing the organisation over £5 per survey to collect, and that the resulting data was often out of date by the time responses were analysed.

The Contact Leeds team now has an approach in place that delivers immediate feedback based on what customers are saying today. This best practice framework enables the team to respond to customer needs rather than operate a more traditional, service-centric contact approach.

3) ::::::: Streamlining of the agent interface :::::::

It’s frustrating that most contact centre agents still have to spend too much time logging onto different internal systems and jumping between applications, keeping their callers waiting on the phone. This is a direct result of the complexity agents face when having to use anything between five and ten separate IT applications while trying to deal with the day-to-day needs of customers.

We’ve effectively left agents to handle all the applications integration during the call, and it’s not unusual for what seem like simple tasks to involve up to 20 different process steps and nine system swap-overs. However, using some of the latest user interface and service oriented architecture (SOA) techniques, organisations can now start to optimise their agent desktops and implement best practice templates to speed up operational processes.

During the next year we expect to see the wider deployment of a new generation of clean and intuitive agent desktops to increase agent productivity by an average of 30%. The focus here will be on increasing the proportion of ‘value’ to ‘non-value’ activities during an interaction. The use of these new desktop approaches should also help considerably in reducing the 50% of agent training time that is currently spent on basic IT tasks rather than on customer service skills.

4) ::::::: The acceleration of multi-channel :::::::

It’s probably fair to say that most companies’ multi-channel service capabilities haven’t kept pace with the growing consumer requirement to contact organisations when and how they want to. However with 13 million UK households now possessing broadband connections, most UK consumers now have an expectation of near instant response, irrespective of the channel they’re using.

Resultantly, there’s a growing requirement for organisations not only to support multiple customer contact channels, but also to provide consistency across them - whether it’s voice, e-mail, interactive voice response (IVR), speech, web or text.

However, it’s not enough just to offer a multi-channel capability. To really benefit, you have to do it well by offering a quality and consistent customer experience across all channels. Technology is obviously an enabler for this, but it’s also essential that you get all your people and processes in place to make multi-channel customer interactions really work for both your customers and your own organisation.

If you can get your multi-channel approach right, there are benefits for both your business and your customers. Using multi-channel correctly can reduce the cost of customer transactions, particularly with self-service and automation, while multi-channels can also provide an extended platform for revenue gains and growth.

5) ::::::: Mainstream SIP :::::::

The next year will also see an acceleration in the deployment of IP telephony in the contact centre - particularly solutions based on the session initiation protocol (SIP) that use enterprise software, instead of traditional automatic call distributors (ACDs), to route and control customer interactions.

SIP now has the potential to significantly redefine the total technology cost of ownership (TCO) within the contact centre environment, allowing the deployment of standard, lower-cost gateways and SIP phones instead of more expensive proprietary equipment. With SIP, organisations can go beyond their hybrid Internet protocol (IP) implementations.

The ability to use standard servers and SIP-based gateways and phones will have a dramatic impact on overall TCO, initially perhaps 25% less than traditional proprietary offerings and potentially up to 50% as the SIP standard extends to include broader multimedia capabilities.

According to the analyst group Gartner, we’ll see a growing number of organisations investigating contact centre infrastructure innovations around SIP, SOA, mobility, rich presence and collaboration technologies.

For some organisations these areas will be immediately attractive; others will continue in the short-term to rely on the functional richness and security of their proprietary technology stacks.
Irrespective of this, 2008 will - in our opinion - turn out to be the year when SIP really takes its place in the contact centre technology environment.

Source: http://www.callcentrehelper.com/

Indian call center lands in Ohio

More foreign companies are finding that hiring Americans offers distinct advantages, reports Fortune's Jia Lynn Yang.

It would be easy to imagine Reno, Ohio, as the type of place that would be hit hardest by outsourcing - a small American town losing out to the invisible hand shifting jobs to places like Bangalore and Guangzhou. Instead, outsourcing is bringing the jobs to Reno. Across the street from an Army Reserve center and next to a farm, a customer-service call center hums, its 250 workers answering phones for online travel agency Expedia. The center's owner? Indian conglomerate Tata Group.

The phenomenon has a name: "insourcing," the term experts are starting to use when foreign multinationals open offices on U.S. soil and hire Americans, at a higher price, to do the very jobs they once lured overseas. In this case the center in Reno is targeted toward companies willing to pay a premium - its workers there cost up to 40 percent more than their counterparts in India - to give their U.S. customers a more culturally fluent, less frustrating 1-800 experience. (No more hearing someone read from a script ten time zones away.)

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Biggest Philippine call center to open

MANILA, Philippines--Contact service provider Teleperformance will launch Friday what officials say is the country’s biggest call center with 2,500 seats, at the EDSA Central in Mandaluyong City.

Called New EDSA IT Center 2, the center is a two-level building occupying about 16,000 square meters with 2,500 fully equipped workstations.

Teleperformance, which has corporate headquarters in Paris, France, and Miami Beach in Florida, also plans to open two more sites in two years to bring its workforce here to at least 10,000 people.

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India's Call-Center Jobs Go Begging

An Indian employee at a call center provides service support to international customers in the southern city of Bangalore.

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.

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India's Youth Set Sights Beyond Call Centers

As India’s economy booms, its young workers are no longer so keen on trying to soothe the irate customers of the global companies that outsource their call center jobs in the country. Industries like aviation and retail are among the new favorites for job seekers, says a study.

The business process outsourcing sector, which now has attrition rates ranging from 25% to 30%, could see that number climb to 30% to 40% over the next two years, says the study on urban youths’ emerging career choices, conducted by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry.

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Calls to UK cops could soon be answered by Indian call centres

Phone calls to British police stations could soon be answered by someone in India, with police across the UK privatizing their call centres and backroom staff under cost-cutting measures.

Owing to a massive cash deficiency, the British government has been forced to relax the rules to permit forces to sign contracts with private companies, including foreign firms.

Up to 20,000 backroom jobs in forces across the UK could be transferred to private firms in the next year, with some possibly moving overseas.

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Gartner warns against Indian call centre fraud

A shortage of skilled labour for Indian call centres increases the risk of fraud and identity theft, analyst firm Gartner warned in a newly published study.

The increased risk is the result of a shortage of call centre agents with Indian call centres. The need for trained and qualified call centre workers is set to reach 1 million by 2009, according to study by the Indian government, but by that time about one quarter of those positions will remain unfilled.

The shortfall in call centre agents will cause offshore outsourcing firms to hire less qualified staff and could lead to reduced due diligence, warned Gartner. The analyst firm advised its clients to pay close attention to attrition rates and security measures, and make sure that its contracts guarantee service level agreements and penalties.

The security of outsourcing companies is an ongoing concern. Last July a call centre worker in India stole and sold account details of 1,000 customers of a UK bank to an undercover reporter for the Sun for 4.25 per account.

In another case last April police arrested three form Indian call centre employees for attempting to steal $350,000 from accounts of clients of Citibank.

In addition to the security risks, the shortage of operators will also increase the labour costs for skilled operators, which in turn is set to erode the competitive advantage of offshore call centres, while the average quality level of the centres is at risk of falling.

Source: http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2142204/gartner-warns-indian-call

Choosing the best call center technology

Selecting effective call center technology is a matter of following a highly defined process and identifying the risks associated with each product being considered.

Many firms rush through the important organizational stages of call center technology selection projects and chaotically leap into analyzing products based only on the functionality that's needed -- or worse, they start the selection process with a specific vendor already in mind, Brian Hinton warned a roomful of ACCE attendees.

"How are you going to sort through all of the options?" said Hinton, a senior consultant with Strategic Contact, who boasts 10 years of call center consulting experience. "The way to find the right [software] is to apply a structured process to analyze your options."

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Verizon Introduces Broadband Video Call Center Link for Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing Customers in Mid-Atlantic Region

Customers in the Mid-Atlantic region who are deaf or hard of hearing can now communicate directly with Verizon about their services, using videophones and American Sign Language.

The new option for engaging Verizon's Center for Customers with Disabilities is available here and in Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia. Customers can communicate directly via videophone with representatives in the Verizon center who are proficient in using American Sign Language (ASL) to handle orders, change services or answer questions.

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Virtual call centers driving VoIP adoption

Contact centers are increasingly turning to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) to run their operations, and the interest in "virtual call centers" is driving much of that change, according to some recent research.

VoIP is helping enterprises to do away with their large call centers -- with rows and rows of agents being monitored by on-site managers -- and turn to the "virtual call center," a strategy of distributing agents across multiple locations, including home-based agents and offshoring.

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Is the Customer Always Right?

The answer to this headline is both "yes" and "no." Customers are not always right, but they are always the customers even when they're wrong. Too many practices have rigid rules and policies. How many times have you heard the answer, "this is our office policy"? This can only be described as rigidity. Every situation calls for some flexibility and leeway. By making your staff adhere to rigid rules, you prohibit them from providing customer service that will benefit your practice and image.

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Senior Citizens Pick Up on Call Center Jobs

"We have quite a few senior citizens that work for us and most of them work part-time. We may have a few that work full-time," said Convergys manager Ray Mason. "They are very stable employees, and they usually have some good reason for wanting to work -- sometimes it's just enjoying continuation of work."

He's been a sheriff, an entrepreneur and a school custodian. At 70, he's still a political activist and handyman. However, this elder statesman of Pueblo, Colo.'s Democratic Party has added another career twist to his life -- call center worker at Convergys.

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Call Center Agents: On the Frontlines of War

Everyday, wars are raging around the world. And its not a battle being fought by soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan using guns and missiles for democracy. Instead, this battle is being fought by call center agents in office cubicles using a sophisticated network of computers and telecoms switches to deliver great customer service. The war between companies to put their products on the forefront of the consumer's consciousness has driven them to use customer service as a weapon against the competition. Companies have learned that great customer service can make customers flock to their camp and patronize the products or services that the they are offering. This is where call center agents come into play.

Call center agents are service representatives hired by a client company to handle support and information for a specific product usually through phone calls, faxes or emails. Call centers may be described as a set of functions or actions that can be carried out in a number of ways using multiple delivery channels by merging information and telecommunications technology, Among the services they offer are toll free customer service, direct response, interactive voice response (IVR), 24 - hour help desk, appointment scheduling, order taking services, emergency response, conference and registration, virtual receptionist, and infomercials which can be tailored to suit your company's specific needs. IVR systems are set up to handle the initial stage of customer contact, and is programmed with a set menu for predictable customer questions, which gives them prerecorded answers and tells them how to proceed. If their issue is not adequately addressed by the IVR, customer calls are routed to knowledgeable representatives who have speedy access to information.

Call center agents are soldiers in the front-lines of war. They are a channel between a company and its customers, giving the latter a forum in which their concerns may be addressed and complaints resolved. It is also a way for companies to improve the product or service that they offer because customers can tell you directly exactly what they want. These dedicated soldiers are ready to deploy anytime, anywhere. Call center operations continue like a well-oiled 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This means that your company can cross the boundaries of distance and time zones so you can do business with people worldwide. Because this vital service may be costly for companies to put up themselves, the service is frequently outsourced to a call center company. Outsourcing the service to a call center at a set price is a cost effective solution for any business, large or small. This leaves companies free to concentrate on delivering the product or service without having to worry about the large cost of putting up their own call center and hiring employees to man the phones while being assured that customer satisfaction is being closely monitored. Performance markers for call center agents may include call handling time, call queue length, hold times and customer satisfaction level. Agents who fail these markers are subject for calibration with company standards or retraining as their progress requires. As soldiers are aware that one mistake can cost them their life, all call center agents are aware that every customer contact is a unique opportunity to create more business and cement the loyalty of the customer, so efforts are made to improve and retain relations. Seasoned agents are like war veterans; they know all the tricks of their trade and are keen to impart their hard earned knowledge to new recruits to ensure the same level of service for every customer call. They know that providing great customer service is winning yet another battle for market supremacy.

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Call centre jobs are safe as new owners take over

STAFF at Aviemore's TSC contact centre have been assured that their jobs are safe and not going to India after a change in ownership.

Telecom Service Centres – one of the area's largest employers – has joined forces with Hero ITES, a Hero Group Company, in a multi-million pound move.

TSC presently employs over 130 staff at their base on the Cairngorm Technology Park at Dalfaber.

Bosses have said that the changes not only safeguard present jobs but will also help create more employment throughout the UK.

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Indian law frees users from telemarketers

INDIA--The community of over 230 million telecom subscribers in India will be able to seek relief from unwanted telemarketing calls as the country's Do Not Call directive kicks into action tomorrow.

India's telecom regulator Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) in June unveiled the "Telecom Unsolicited Commercial Communications Regulations 2007", putting in place a mechanism to curb unwanted telemarketing calls.

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