Delhi – India’s capital city – is a great example of how a huge investment in infrastructure, such as transport, still struggles to keep pace with the hugely rapid growth. India is a country of over one billion people and the sheer scale of the place can be hard to imagine.
 
My last visits today, in another new satellite city out of Delhi, re-enforce the earlier learning. Some centres are clearly achieving lower attrition than others – by undertaking initiatives that make them a preferred employer and by being seen to offer training and career development. Experience staff clearly find the communication challenge easier – and have more confidence in identifying the unspoken needs of callers. Process focus helps centres to achieve good satisfaction scores – without however necessarily dealing with the issues of customers who want to do things that are not ‘permitted’ or anticipated.
 
Back in the UK, an experienced consultant explained to me that the root problem was with the board members in the UK who make the decisions about off-shoring work. Expectations of how the off-shore work is set up are key – because the way that this is achieved in India is through specification of processes, which are well adhered to. Understanding of the strengths, weaknesses and opportunities is surely essential in tracking the issues underlying effective communication with frustrated customers.

Before leaving Bangalore earlier in the week, the Professional Planning Forum held its first Indian round-table for workforce management. And today, visiting the IT centre of Gurgoan in Delhi, I was able to meet with a team which has been set up by one global outsourcer, to manage workforce management centrally from India for the UK and US operations. 
 
As a call centre industry matures, a key sign is a growing focus on better resource management. When first set up, the international call centres in India were focussed on all the issues to do with quality, process, client management etc. Now, though still serious issues, there are well-established ways of doing all these things. A sign of the recent maturing of the call centre industry here, workforce management is becoming a hotter issue – as centres focus on costs and efficiency. While this has always been strongest in the domestic call centres, the issues are now more important in the BPO (foreign) call centres too as the Rupee rises and the centres have been established for a few years, overcoming the more critical set up issues. 
 
The organisational model is significantly different between centres, however. In many cases forecasting and scheduling are done in the UK – and the local centres manage issues like “shrinkage” and absence. In some centres, scheduling is done locally, while in other cases the whole resourcing strategy is held in each centre. Along-side this the new model I saw today, looks to centralise key planning roles – whether on-shore or off-shore – leaving local contacts in each centre, who take on the role of communicating with agents (on an admin/real-time basis) and management (on strategic resourcing and performance issues).
 
This experiment in resourcing, fits with the wider strategy of Indian BPO industries, which is to change the paradigm from low-cost labour, to knowledge management. Certainly many of the centres are already undertaking “back office work”; the new paradigm looks to take this further, by building unit that take specific technical functions out of many UK offices, and bring them offshore where the process expertise and technical knowledge can deliver them at lower cost and, potentially, better process quality and consistency.

Indian customer service, as I have experienced it as a visitor here, has its fixed routines. At its best, the eagerness to please leads to rapid process improvement – like the waiter who learned after our first meal that we like bottled water and bottled beer with our meals! At the more ordinary level, a good example is the driver/guide who took us on a tour and was genuinely unable to understand what we wanted, when we said we didn’t want to walk round the museum and the other sights, which were the standard offering. This is perhaps, the key challenge for international call centres. The empathy or cultural expectations that support understanding are not automatically there, even if the language skills have been developed.
 
Today was my second day in Bangalore and I visited a further four centres covering a wide range operations, in financial services, technology and outsourcing for the UK and USA. I heard some very good calls and some where understanding was definitely a key issue. A particular difficulty seemed to arise when callers are already frustrated and are asking for something that is beyond the scope of what is permitted. While, the focus on recruitment of graduates helps communication, as college education, and much early schooling also, is in English, listening to calls at several centres, shows that understanding is still a big issue for most new recruits – and an issue for some extent, even for those with more experience, when going beyond the basics.
 
The strength of the centres is clearly around process design and adherence – in this respect much better than many similar UK centres – and agents are clear what they are and are not permitted to do. From a caller’s point of view this means can lack empathy in saying what they can’t do – and certainly lack the authority to champion a customer issue in challenging the process! The way that some centres tackle this challenge is to have a process of increasing the skill and authority of agents as they gain experience and pass further training and tests. Other centres establish “process improvement “ processes or else plan escalation back to the UK.

Today is the first of two days in Bangalore – India’s IT capital and a city that has now vastly outgrown its infrastructure – making the traffic easily the most challenging yet. Unsurprisingly transport is a key issue – for planners, frustrated at being unable to rely on punctual arrival, for agents, frustrated at the time taken waiting and travelling, and in the choice of location – which affects recruitment significantly. Interestingly, while most centres provide transport, because of their remote location and late finish times (6pm in UK is 11:30pm here), some centres give agents the choice – charging a small amount and finding that many do not take this up.

 
The differences between centres are also significant in key performance indicators, such as attrition, occupancy, sickness, adherence – where some centres have made huge progress in resolving issues that others still regard as a major challenge or an issue yet to come on the agenda.?The variety of working practices belies the image of Indian call centres as very much all running in the same way, and is very similar to the diversity faced in UK or Irish centres only?five years ago, as workforce management practices were staring to emerge.?The diversity is of course even greater when the growing domestic call centre operations are considered – which run under very different cost pressures, with different working practices and language requirements. India has many different languages and the way languages are spoken in the metro cities can be very different to the smaller cities – let alone the villages.

 
One factor that seems to unite the call centres handling UK and USA work however, is the heavy focus on recruiting young people – often around 25 – who are recent graduates. This labour market brings with it problems, in India like in the UK – such as high mobility (attrition) and career aspirations (people want to move to supervisory or higher status roles) within a few years. On the plus side, the recruits have high energy, are quick to learn and positively value the experience of learning about the UK or USA cultures. Indeed, so well recognised is this now as a career path for graduates, that some expectations are embedded and a BPO call centre” lifestyle is established in many of the metro cities, around late shifts, valuing the late mornings, enjoying facilities on the working site such as cafeterias and sports facilities and a focus on working hard in the week and enjoying weekends.?Split working days, for example, came out more strongly as an issue in one focus groups than working late evenings – probably very different to many UK centres.

 
A final thought – as a Brit, I was pleased to learn that working of USA shifts (mostly overnight) was not regarded in the same way – so that people who’d worked on USA contracts for a few years, generally saw the midnight finishes required on UK contracts as a positive breeze...

Today is the chance to visit the call centre industry in Chennai (formerly Madras) down in the south of India. Another city that has seen huge growth, the call centre I visited this afternoon was along the IT corridor – full of “BPO” work (that is business process outsourcing for foreign companies) – and a load of construction of new business parks. In actual fact the building was very new and with facilities that were even better than the UK call centres of that same organisation. This company operates a BOT (Build-Operate-Transfer) contract and the environment was very like the UK call centres – but with the same fundamental challenge of managing the communication across cultures. Other issues – creating targets that drive the right behaviours in a sales environment, people leadership, providing a sense of career progression – could be top of the list in a call centre anywhere.

 
Communication here starts with language neutralisation and comprehension – the question is how it goes beyond that.  I’ve listened in to a number of calls now and found a wide variety. Experience is clearly a key driver – newer people face more pressure around the product and process knowledge as well as the communication and this shows in communication, which is as much about what isn’t said as the words a caller actually uses. Here the nuance of voice tone, rhythm and the unspoken feelings of the caller as much more easy to pick up with confidence and experience. Interestingly, in one focus group, helping his team with this challenge was identified by a team leader as his number one day-to-day issue – yet others in the group didn’t see it at all. With this communication issue coming up strongly in the horror stories picked up by the UK media, maybe part of the issue is that there is still more work to do in understanding what good communication really involves in call handling?