[lbo-talk] More India Shining

Matt lbo4 at beyondzero.net
Wed Jan 17 05:44:56 PST 2007


On Tue, Jan 16, 2007 at 03:00:02PM -0800, Jordan Hayes wrote:
> >I fail to see why these women do not sharpen up their U.S English
> >accents and join a call centre.
>
> I fail to see why the people who join call "centres" don't sharpen up
> their U.S. English skills first. I had to call United Airlines 5 times
> the other night to get someone who understood the question I had.
>
> I guess my actual complaint is with those who are the hiring managers.

Indeed. I did not know if Ravi was joking, as in working a call center is worse than selling your kidneys...

I ran the IT component of two outsourcing projects last year. One was two connect the company to a BPO (business process outsourcing) provider, the other to a different IT outsourcing provider. The actual job transition projects were run by other people. Even though my focus was completing a project to provide infrastructure between the three companies to enable the transition, I had a lot of exposure to how the actual process worked.

What I saw was a lot of over commitment by the BPO and ITO managers and company managers, with the burden of the agreements falling on the folks staffing the facilities in India. They were under-trained and under-prepared for what they would be expected to do. Turnover is incredibly high. All this on top of the incredibly high morale and commitment the folks in India were displaying to be "part of the team" and feel part of the company they were contracted for. They couldn't get enough of company posters and t-shirts, stuff that most of of us here stateside laugh at when it is given to us, due to being generally cynical about the notion that we are some kind of "family" since we all work for the same company (what sort of family cuts pensions and increases health care costs...).

It has to be incredibly frustrating and disheartening that when these folks actually start getting calls they receive more than the normal call-center abuse since they have accents and are 'foreigners who took American jobs'. I doubt I would last a week.

For their part, our IT department did hire an Indian company to come and give us a mandatory half-day session explaining some things about Indian culture and some different notions of workplace etiquette we may experience. They also covered some aspects of how English may be used a bit differently. But it was only for IT.

Matt

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