Worldwide, it is estimated that there are more than 100,000 call centers, employing around 18 million people. This is expected to grow to 300,000 by 2002. According to Nasscom, customer interaction services—including call centers, in India employ about 10,000 people, as on 30 July 2000 and this is supposed to grow to 270,000 people by 2008, according to the Nasscom McKinsey report.

Seeing such a huge requirement of call center agents in India, a few call center institutes have opened up in different cities of India like—Sapphire Callnet in New Delhi, North Star Call Center College in Noida, Karrox in Mumbai, and Call Center College in Bangalore. However, all these institutes focus on entry level call center agents or provide customized training for companies planning to jump into call centers for entry level agents. They do not train middle or top level executives in the call center industry, creating a wide gap between demand and supply, as the number of top and middle level executives is increasing—with the opening up of new call centers in the country.

Bhisham Mulawaney of North Star Call Center College feels that since the industry is in the nascent stage, the focus of the call center is in providing entry level training and not full-fledged training. Even the number of students enrolled in these institutes would be around 150 collectively, indicating that people are unable to decide whether they should choose call centers or software as their profession. There is a mad rush for the latter.

Most of the institutes train people on the soft skills—where maximum time is devoted and around 10 percent of the time is devoted to getting acquainted with technical skills, so that the overall function can be performed by the agent in an efficient way. But, training modules are not available for top and middle level managers like team leaders, supervisors, and managers. Sapphire Callnet is the only call center in the country that has modules catering to the technical skills, which include computer basics, CTI, ACD, IVR, e-CRM, call quality measurement and other web enabled applications. "In the middle of next year, North Star Call Center College is planning to have call center courses for call center managers", says Ravi Sikund, CEO, North Star Call Center College.

The soft skills include training on language skills—oral and written communication (grammar, accent and comprehension); culture—customs and traditions; technical skills—handling PCs, e-mail, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) package, Computer Telephony Integration (CTI), Automatic Call Distribution (ACD), Interactive Voice Response (IVR); marketing skills—sales techniques, negotiation skills, customer care and handling difficult people; extra skills—stress management, team management, time management; and country specific training.

For getting acquainted with the system, most of the call centers do have a full-fledged call center where practical training is imparted through simulated talks within the group and not real talk. Call center institutes should also promote on-line experiences to the people, by tying-up with call centers in their cities.

To cater to the top and middle-level management, most of the call centers outsource their training requirements to consultants like Holistic Enterprises, who have expertise in domestic and international call centers for soft skills. Holistic trains people on customer service, call center processes, cross cultural communication, team working and problem solving, voice and accent training, and training the trainer for developing in-house resources. The company provides consultancy in call center areas like identifying training needs, reviewing problem incidences, setting processes, increasing productivity and benchmarking of service delivery for call centers.

The success of any call center, whether domestic or international, will depend on the quality of training imparted by these institutes in the long run. Ian Stern, managing partner, Holistic Enterprises, says training should also focus on emotional maturity, as those joining call centers are young. The agents work at very high stress levels, as they handle 80 to 100 calls of varied nature. They should also be trained on how to sit for long hours doing one task rather than multiple tasks at the same time.

Institutes