Considering that call center professionals belong to a technical profession, the body AICTE, under the aegis of the ministry of human resources development, is supposed to exercise some checks. But in reality, a ‘free-for-all’ situation scems to exist, which has resulted in an unhindered growth of the not so good quality training institutes. All that is required in starting a training institute is to get it registered for a small sum with little verification. About 90 percent of these institutes do not have the minimal training infrastructure. The result is that the pass-outs from these institutes are increasingly getting rejected during the initial screening by call center recruitment teams. Recently, a call center in Mumbai rejected an entire batch of students from an institute. Those trained often do not have any advantage over the freshers who apply for the post of agents due to obvious reasons. But there has to be a logical way to check these institutes.

Retaining, But How?

There has to be a way out to avoid the unpleasant situation as discussed above. Retaining an agent for more than a year has become an uphill task. Why is it so? According to the Communications Workers of America, the union which represents call centers in the US, employee turnover in call centers is more influenced by the work environment than salaries. It also says that 80 percent of call centers are stressful places work, causing employees to perform poorly and customers to be dissatisfied. According to Dr Rajesh Sood, a medical transcription training expert and currently the production manager with NY Dox, "As call center and medical transcription jobs are customary, saturation level sets in quickly, employees should be given some quasi-management functions in the form of additional responsibilities, etc, which will let them stay in the job for a longer period of time".

The HR managers have to seriously work towards developing what is called a career path to offer additional responsibilities to the call center workers. A sustained effort has to be made towards promoting the profession as ongoing and not as a temporary employment opportunity, which is the situation as of now. Besides the career path, statistics suggest that adequate and high-quality training also aid in employee retention. The general perception about these contact centers is that they have been setup with the single purpose of exploiting the cheap human resource. There is a need to demystify this. The training wing has to be really strong and should offer ample opportunities for ongoing training and continuing education. This can help, to a large extent, in the retention of employees. Needless to say, effort should be made to a decent salary which would make the profession more attractive. But Smriti Ahuja, vice president, HR, ExI Services said, "Paying high salary is no guarantee to retain".

Meticulous Training is the Key to Success

There is a need to identify the pre-requisites of training process in a proper manner. The call center professionals are an interface that big companies create to handle their most important business element – the customer. What is important for these professionals is to understand the business model of the companies they are working in and give an informed help that will satisfy the customers most. They should also have training on soft-skills required to handle a cross section of global customers. According to Sidharth Talwar, president, The Mindbank, an end-to-end HR business solution provider, "Call center training is a very specific, very independent and very individualistic training where training of one center will be different from training of another center". He further adds "There are large groups of people who are hired and trained but cannot deliver. Training cannot do everything, the person has to be a keen learner". According to Talwar "Nearly, 85 percent of call center agents in the US are not white. They are immigrants and it is only because they have been trained properly that they are delivering". The Mindbank has aligned with Assessment Solution Inc in the US for CRM modules. It has also tied up with the University of California Davis, which has expertise in teaching English as a second language. They administer online tests and give certificates to those who qualify. This training takes into consideration the various dialect variations that are there in India. Adds Lynda C Lepcha, training director of Holistic Enterprises, who had the distinction of setting up City Bank’s call center in India "Trainees have to be conditioned psychologically to handle the calls and so cognitive skills are very important". "The diverse accents in India make training a difficult task at times but standardized modules can take care of this issue", said Lepcha.

SM Nafay Kumail and Gaurav Chadha, project managers in Knowledge Solutions Business of NIIT say, "The new economy learning tools, such as Web-based Training (WBT) and Virtual Classroom (VCR) would be best for training in call center space". In VCR, the learners are online with the instructor who controls the environment and gives control to the learner wherever required. Trainer is heard and seen, and voice and data can travel back and forth. Both the trainer and learner can use a certain amount of real estate on their PC screen to show presentations, write and draw sketches and exchange notes. VCR also has the facility of chat that can go along with the audio interaction that happens between trainers and students. The novelty of such a training mechanism is that it can happen in various locations at the same time. Kumail is of the view that VCR will be more useful in call center type of training, since it will also have an element of real life situations, as the call center people are interacting with people in the remote areas.

According to Gaurav Chadha, "These professionals are supposed to represent the concerned companies and hence, need to be informed of critical business information and should understand the concerned business model". He also suggests that online learning communities should be developed where trainers and students can interact among themselves and guide each other to handle the challenges in the way.

They can also learn from the good points of each community segment (trainers or students). Such an arrangement will not be very difficult in today’s hi-tech environment. There is a need to learn from the mistakes of medical transcription training, which started on similar lines and is in utter chaos today.

There is an urgent need for the call center industry in India to organize itself under a forum. Several splinter call center organizations have cropped up without any sort of seriousness and agenda. Most of these are efforts to gang-up to deal with policy-related issues rather than the important issue of standardizing training process.

CRM foundation and the Call Center Association of India were a good beginning but they are not totally representative of the industry which is in its nascent stage. Companies have to come together and develop a standard for CRM in India if the haphazard growth of substandard training has to be checked. Efforts should also be made towards some sort of curriculum development wherein the institutes who want to offer training can conform to the norm. Going a step further, Indian universities can start a full-time degree course in customer relationship management, given its potential for the future.

Sudesh Prasad