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Inside the mind of a BPO
worker
While
the debate over benefits and disadvantages of outsourcing
rages in the US, India continues to be the customer care hub
for more and more companies. For Indian call centre operators,
what is it like to be supporting customer calls from halfway
across the globe? MOHAN BABU highlights the experiences of
one such former operator
Not
a day goes by without an article on Business Process or IT
Outsourcing (BPO/ITO)—a trend that has helped thousands of
Indian graduates find a meaningful and lucrative(?) vocation.
In a country with high rate of joblessness, this is definitely
welcome. Graduates with a BA, BCom or other degree, who otherwise
would join the ranks of unemployed youth, are finding a welcome
break in the nascent field of call centre management.
While
the debate over benefits and disadvantages of outsourcing
rages, sourcing of low-end work, especially the management
and staffing of call centre staff is definitely a win-win
proposition. In the West, where a career as a call centre
(aka telemarketing) agent is seen as being just a notch over
that of flipping burgers, attracting and retaining operators
is a logistical nightmare for managers, especially with extremely
high attrition and burnout rates. By outsourcing such jobs,
Western companies are better positioned to focus on their
core competence. In this game, all is well and everyone is
happy, right? Well, almost.
I
recently had an interesting conversation with an ex-call centre
worker, an engineer who moved to be with her spouse in the
US after they got married. The young lady, let’s call her
Jane (an Americanised moniker given to her by her call centre
boss) had mixed feelings about her stint at the call centre.
We got talking, and she told me about how she joined the firm
in the ‘tech corridor’ in Bangalore right after graduating
from engineering college. The support centre where she worked
was designed to handle calls for a large American PC manufacturer,
and the operators including Jane fielded all kinds of technical
calls. There were about 1,000 others like her who worked for
the company in shifts round the clock. Most of them were graduate
engineers in their early twenties. The company would hire
from a pool of eager and talented graduates and put them through
an intensive hands-on training for about two weeks before
letting them field live calls. During training, the engineers
would be taught to use the software used during call support
and were expected to master the internals of the different
makes of PCs sold by the company.
What
was it like to be supporting customer calls from halfway across
the globe, I wondered. Jane told me that there was hardly
such a thing as a ‘typical day’ since the demographics, expertise
and tech-savvyness of the callers varied widely. Some would
be complete novices who had just picked up the PC in a box
from a supermarket and needed assistance even connecting the
monitor to the CPU. Of course, they would not know what a
CPU was, other than it being a ‘big box’ with wires protruding
out. On the other side of the spectrum were callers who were
conversant with the internals of hardware and software, who
were facing problem with configuring a particular version
of a driver software that they had already successfully installed.
Jane
told me how she learned to deal with different callers, guiding
them by asking the right questions without being too intrusive.
She described the gratification she sometimes received after
successfully helping callers who would be vocal in showering
praises. Of course, she also had her fair share of irate callers
who were obnoxious, abusive and unwilling to work with Jane
who was trying to help them. Some, like one memorable caller
perhaps had a (valid?) reason to be irate: he called the day
he divorced his wife and wanted Jane to help him ensure that
every file, document and ‘memory’ of his ex-wife was purged
from the system. He was on the verge of physically destroying
the CPU when he called the customer service hoping to salvage
his investment. To his credit, when he started to talking
to Jane, he realised that she was in a position to help him
and Jane had to wear two hats during that call: one as a systems
administrator and the other as a counsellor and therapist.
Jane
had many such interesting, and sometimes amusing anecdotes
to narrate and I started to get an idea of the highly intense
and sometimes stressful nature of the work—that of being on
the phone attending to and solving other’s problems involved.
Shorn of the glamour, the job was definitely challenging and
excruciating, sometimes involving skills one has not even
been trained to use.
Jane
worked on that job for a little under two years and said that
if she had an option to revisit a career as a call centre
operator, with the benefit of hindsight, she would probably
have second thoughts. Having said that, for every Jane who
has been through the groove, there are probably a hundred
others eagerly willing to fill her shoes at the call centre
in Bangalore, India. And the cycle continues.
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