The good news is that the call center industry in India is emerging as one of
the largest human resource employer in the country. Reliance reportedly, has
plans to hire 1-lakh agents for its major foray into call center business.
Spectramind is in the process of setting up 1,000 seats center in Okhla. Bharti
Infotrac, also has similar plans. Conseco’s acquisition of Exl services for Rs
250 crore is already creating waves. The demand for trained professionals is
tremendous and so the stakes are high. The nature of these jobs that are being
created entails a different set of training altogether, even rudimentary tools
not being available in India due to the obvious reason that these professions
were new. The bad news is that—most of the training that is being imparted in
the country is nowhere near the global standards. There is a great training
divide between what is needed and what is available or delivered. The success of
call center business in India will depend on the kind of training that will be
available to the companies.
|
The Flip Side |
|
As you walk into GE’s call center at Gurgaon, you
cannot stop noticing a brand new car wrapped in a gift pack parked outside
the building. Take a few steps inside the facility where you can see a few
bikes lined up just next to workstations. No, these are not for display by
the company for publicity purpose. In fact, these have been displayed as
an incentive for the agents to perform, excel and stay back in the job,
according to company officials. Read the fine print. The company is
reportedly receiving about fifty resignations every day and issuing a
similar number of appointment letters to keep their center up and running.
Retaining these on-the-move agents has become the greatest challenge
that human resource managers have ever faced. New centers that are setup,
usually offer a higher salary for the experienced agents and these young
employees, do not mind switching jobs even for a paltry raise of Rs 500 or
so. Most of them treat this job as an ad-hoc arrangement and time to freak
out, and very few are serious about pursuing career in the field due to
the uncertainties about future prospects and high level of insecurity of
job. Working in odd hours and in shifts has only compounded the problem.
They work when everybody sleeps and vice versa, to suit the client’s
time zone. This unnatural working environment is taking its toll. Many
have quit their job due to this particular reason. Air Infotech, also
located in Gurgaon, sacked about twenty employees last year. According to
Amitpal Singh, one of the agents "Without giving any proper training,
the management decided that we were not fit for the job and we were asked
to leave suddenly". He adds "There was no training team, no
trainers and so we spent entire three months playing games and doing
non-serious activities, unrelated to our profession". Despite
repeated attempts by VOICE&DATA, no one was available for comments.
These two examples could just be the tip of the iceberg and an eye opener
for other players to get their act together. |
The pioneers in the field sought to fill the training gap by importing
training tools – that included getting trainers from the US to kick off their
operations. These trainers were flown in to do the needful and needless to say,
they did a fairly good job. But as the capacity of these operations kept
increasing astronomically, the companies were unable to handle on-the-job
training.
The Dream Merchants
The
need for trained professionals has led to the emergence of two types of training
markets. One, the easy way out was setting up shops to train people to take up
these jobs. Training institutes saw this as an opportunity to fill up the
training gap. No wonder, training of agents for call centers and
transcriptionists for transcription centers have opened floodgates of
opportunities to the likes of companies highly motivated on becoming NIITs or
Aptechs of these industries. Ironically enough, the training majors NIIT and
Aptech, chose not to jump into the call center bandwagon. The results are
horrifying. This has led to a haphazard mushrooming of training centers offering
these courses, across the length and breadth of the country like the pan (betel)
shops. There are no checks. Fly-by-night operators have woken up suddenly to the
fact that they can make quick money by imparting incomplete training, which is
grossly insufficient to cope with the demanding nature of a job that involves
direct interaction with people who are far away and who speak, think, and behave
in a way unlike an Indian. What they say is training material is nothing, but an
unintelligent aggregation of some material from the great information resource—the
Internet. The material so assorted is grossly inadequate and devised without the
use of any expertise.
Amidst all this chaos, the immediate gainers are those companies who are
genuinely serious about paying attention to the whole process of call center
training and wanting to extend their expertise to offer training solutions to
the companies who wanted to setup such centers. These companies strongly object
to being clubbed with the student-training institutes. They say, they are pure
B2B players who offer training solutions to the call centers. They take up the
training responsibilities right from the recruitment process to training,
retraining and continuing education. The Mindbank, located in Noida, is one such
company that provides a total training solution to the call center companies in
India. Partly funded by Singapore Technologies and headed by a young NRI
Sidharth Talwar, the company has big plans to revolutionize the way training is
imparted at the center. Holistic Enterprises, headed by Ian Stern has been in
the country since 1994, offers similar solutions to the startup call centers,
domestic as well as international.
But then, there are companies who have established themselves and have
created their own training modules, and their training is totally in-house. But
not many companies have resources and expertise to go without seeking the help
of outside agencies.
Next Page : Regulation Amiss
Page(s) 1 2
