File spoon-archives/aut-op-sy.archive/aut-op-sy_2001/aut-op-sy.0103, message 54


Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2001 11:45:50 +0200
From: Peter van Heusden <pvh-AT-egenetics.com>
Subject: AUT: Call centre globalisation


I mentioned a few weeks ago that one of the facets of globalisation which
might aid class re-composition was the capitalist need for standardization.
The following article, from the UK Guardian, on Indian call centres
which teach their staff to act British or American, is fascinating from
that point of view. I'm working on an essay which will touch on 
the role of translation (in a broad sense) in circuits of struggle, and
one of the points I want to focus on is the question of difference and
heterogeneity vs. homogeneity.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4148971,00.html

  Guardian Unlimited Archive 

Delhi calling

It may look like a UK number, but do you really know where the person
on the other end of the line is? Luke Harding visits a call centre in
India where the staff take crash courses in Britishness

Luke Harding
Guardian

Friday March 9, 2001

It is 6.30pm and in a smart open plan office in south Delhi, the air
is humming with a thousand telephone calls. Sitting in a row of
sound-muffling cubicles, a group of pleasant-looking young Indian
graduates are talking into their designer headsets. Some are dressed
in jeans; others in bright salwar kameez . Their customers, however,
are rather a long way away, in a place where it is still lunchtime and
probably cold.

They are in Sidcup, perhaps, or verdant East Cheam - dotted across a
grey island nation that from here seems remote and eccentric. The
customers have rung a number in the UK to check their mobile telephone
bill, or to ask about a new product or service. They are, for the most
part, spectacularly unaware that their inquiry has been routed
thousands of miles away to an Indian call centre, which serves rotis
in its upstairs canteen and has a good view from the roof terrace of a
giant lotus temple.

Not, of course, that there is much to give the game away. The
subterfuge is truly magnificent. Callers are greeted with a "good
afternoon" when it is already evening in India and dark. Should the
caller lob in a reference to David Beckham or the Queen Mother, Indian
staff are able to give a suitable off-the-cuff reply. Nothing is left
to chance.

This is Spectramind, one of India's newest and most sophisticated call
centres: a place of soothing pastel colours, tasteful lighting and
expensive green carpets. The entire four-storey building exudes the
smell of fresh paint - and of colossal corporate self-confidence.
Here, recruits receive a 20-hour crash course in British culture. They
watch videos of soap operas, including The Bill, Emmerdale, Brookside,
Coronation Street and EastEnders, to accustom them to regional
accents. They are told who Robbie Williams is. They learn about
Yorkshire pudding. And they are taught about Britain's unfailingly
miserable climate.

Each computer screen shows Greenwich Mean Time and the temperature in
the UK, in case a staff member feels the urge to reveal that India is
enjoying yet another day of blue skies and sunny weather. "We find
showing new staff videos of Yes, Prime Minister is particularly
effective," says Raman Roy, Spectramind's sleek, pipe-smoking chief
executive. "They get a two-hour seminar on the royal family. We
download the British tabloids every morning from the web to see what
our customers are reading. We make our new staff watch Premier League
football games on TV. And we also explain about the weather, because
British people refer to the subject so frequently. It is a science,"
he adds, proudly.

And so it is, so much so that Britain's 3,500 call centres are justly
worried that their jobs will soon disappear entirely - as more and
more firms relocate or "outsource" key elements of their businesses to
India. This apprehension was confirmed by a report published last
month. It said that the Indian call centres were superior to their
British counterparts in every way. They were cheaper - costing only
35-40% as much. They had better technological facilities. They had
smarter staff.

American Express and British Airways started the trend eight years
ago, when they transferred their "captive" customer service empires to
Delhi, and then Bombay. BA was attracted by India's seemingly
unlimited pool of English-speaking graduates, 25% of whom fail to find
jobs. Indian graduates required starting salaries of only £2,500, as
opposed to £12,500. They were IT literate, and highly motivated. The
savings were enormous.

Gradually, other British companies cottoned on. Last year, Harrods
controversially shifted its store-card operation from Leeds to Delhi.
It has been joined by Debenhams, Top Shop, Dorothy Perkins, Burton
and, fittingly, Monsoon. The insurers RSA and Axa Sun Life have
recently moved elements of administration to Bangalore, India's IT
capital.

Not surprisingly, British unions are starting to complain loudly. They
object, in particular, to the fact that some Indian call centres
encourage their staff to change their names to sound more, well,
English. Thus Siddhartha might become Sid, or Gitanjali could be
Hazel, not Gita. At Spectramind staff keep their original names, Roy
explains: "It is not a disadvantage to be called Ramakrishna these
days." (It was obviously merely a happy coincidence that his sari-clad
secretary was called Sarah.)

It is no secret within the industry that "agents" are taught to
minimise their Indian accents, to speak more slowly, and to watch the
BBC news. "We don't try and teach our staff to speak with British
accents. But after talking to British people they do start to sound
like them," manager Mr Viswanathan admits. Even after intense
training, though, some callers from Britain are impossible to under
stand, it seems. "We borrow tapes from the British Council in Delhi.
But even after listening to them there are about 20% of callers who
don't make any sense at all," says Padmini Misra, vice-president
(training).

That India has so many charming and intelligent English speakers is
clearly one of the nicer legacies of colonialism - so we can hardly
complain 50 years on that they are stealing our jobs. Most of
Spectramind's new recruits have been educated at English-orientated
schools. They spend Friday nights watching Goodness Gracious Me and
repeats of Blackadder on Star TV, India's most contemporary channel.
But watching Rowan Atkinson prance about in an Elizabethan ruff is no
substitute for actually having visited the UK, which most of them have
not done. This is where Misra's crash course comes in. "We have
training modules on geography, history and the monarchy, and on
Britain's social structure," she says. "We teach them about British
food - Yorkshire puddings for one - which would not be familiar to a
young Indian fellow here. We give them quizzes on Britain and allow
them to surf the net. And we tell them about what high-street shops
there are."

Misra also sheds light on why the old sit-com Yes, Prime Minister goes
down so well among the staff - it's because the rococo bureaucracy of
Whitehall corresponds so closely with India's own. Such are the
sensitivities involved, however, that most Indian call firms refuse to
discuss their methods. They also strive to conceal who their clients
are - or what, exactly, they do for them. "We have to decline your
request," the US finance group GE Capital sniffs, when I ask to have a
look round its huge call centre in Gurgaon, on the road between Delhi
and the historic town of Jaipur. "Why tell our competitors how we run
and manage our business?" GE handles the store-card accounts of
Harrods and other major British chains, such as Russell and Bromley.
It has some 2.5m British customers but does not believe in the virtues
of transparency.

"Clients don't always like the customer to know that any service from
them to the customer has been outsourced," Matthew Vallance concedes.
His firm, CustomerAsset, recently opened two new call centres in
Bangalore and he predicts that more and more British firms will shift
to the subcontinent. But it is not just the UK that is outsourcing to
India: a huge amount of what is known as "remote processing" is now
being done in India for the US market. While Tennessee slumbers,
members of Spectramind's American team are busy. They are working on
invoices that have been scanned and emailed to them from halfway
across the world, or preparing to chase up students who have defaulted
on debts of £10-£50.

The US-orientated staff are trained in the nuances of baseball in the
same way that the British team watch The Bill in a shiny second-floor
classroom decorated with photos of Tower Bridge and Prince Charles.
Blue "Tennessee Titans" pennants fly above the American team's desks.
"Geography is history. Distance is irrelevant. Where you are
physically located is unimportant. I can log on anywhere in the
world," Roy declares.

His firm is not deceiving the customer, merely providing a "global
servicing resource", he explains. After a successful career at
American Express and GE Capital, he founded Spectramind 11 months ago.
The firm is now hiring 150 new graduates a month and receives 8,000
applications from a single advertisement in the Hindustan Times. It is
already hunting for a second overflow office, as the number of
employees shoots up from 400 to 2,000.

With the industry doubling in size every couple of months, India is
well on the way to becoming the call centre capital of the world -
with a turnover, analysts predict, of $3.7bn by 2008. In a luxuriantly
illuminated waiting room decorated with a photo of a giant eagle
("Leaders are like Eagles. You only find one of them at a time") a
group of applicants is comparing notes after a fourth gruelling
interview.

"I've already written three exams. I'm an honours engineering
graduate," whispers one young male applicant who is wearing a tie. He
and his fellow candidates are in their early 20s. They are bright,
middle class and tidily presented. They are, in short, the kind of
people who wouldn't be seen dead in a UK call centre - unless the
bailiffs were knocking at the door or the student loan had to be paid
off urgently.

On the floor below, the British desk, which starts work at 6.30pm
(Indian standard time), is still greeting callers with a "good
afternoon". The shift finishes at 2.30am, just as Britain is washing
up or settling down on the sofa to watch the telly. The Indian
graduates are then ferried home in luxury Toyota Qualises, through
still-warm streets full of somnolent cows, yapping pye-dogs and
snoring rickshaw drivers. We are a world away from Sidcup. The
darkness is only broken by the flood-lit lotus temple, serene and
milky white in the distance.


UP 
        Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001
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