The alarming pace at which recruitment supplements of national dailies were thinning has been arrested, thanks to a significant chunk of call center agent ads. Go through these ads and what hits you is that most of them are inviting fresh graduates only. Trained agents are rarely sought after.

The cause is not hard to find out. Raman Roy, president and CEO, Spectramind eServices, says, "We prefer fresh graduates because we do not trust the quality of training institutes. In many cases, we have to initiate a process of un-learning for recruits from some institutes, which is a very painful task. We have now blacklisted some of the training institutes." But he adds in the same breath, "We will be more than happy to hire recruits who are properly trained and can be deployed for operations immediately."

Spectramind has a full-fledged training division headed by a vice president, and Roy considers the division critical to the success of the company. The recent acquisition of Call Center College, UK by Saffron, (formerly Air Infotech), is also to address the issue of training manpower. Today, most of the call centers have either set up their internal training divisions or have outsourced their training needs to corporate trainers. There seem to be few takers for agents trained in the retail market.

Looking at the problem, Shyam Vishwanathan, CEO, Icon Data Management, a call center initiative of the Dalmia Group and Gujarat Heavy Chemicals, says, "It is imperative for the training industry and the call center industry to work in tandem. Poaching is a short-term solution and will be detrimental to the industry in the long-term." Roy of Spectramind adds, "Where are we going to find 1 million people for the much-touted $17-billion industry? My firm belief is that vocational training has to be integrated at the secondary school level."

A synergy between call centers and the training industry therefore assumes much significance. There has to be more interaction between the two for mutual benefits. And, instead of cold shouldering the training institutes, it is time that call centers viewed them as partners who would perform a valuable function.

Although forums like the CRM Foundation and the Call Center Association do exist, there is no formal feedback from the industry to help train agents.

The retail training industry needs to firm up curriculum addressing issues like correct accents, language nuances, cultural behavioral patterns and customer expectations in developed economies. Cultural issues are as important if not more in the call center industry and agents have to be exposed to that. Stress management is another important issue that has to be addressed by the training industry.

However, there are some serious players in the space like Hero Mindmine, Holistic Enterprises and MindBank. While Hero Mindmine is into retail training, the other two players are focussed on corporate training. Recently, two bigger names in retail training—Tata Infotech and Aptech—have also forayed into the call center training space.

Rahul Thapan, head, education and training, Tata Infotech, says, "We have conducted corporate training for call centers and have very satisfied clients who now want us to undertake the entire recruitment process including screening, interviewing and training. They want people who can be deployed as call center agents immediately."

Ian Stern, founder of Holistic Enterprises, who have been providing call center training to captive centers like GE and Nestle, feels that retail call center training has a long way to go in India. In his opinion, one of the most pressing problems faced by the industry is the lack of quality trainers—a fact corroborated by others in the industry. It is high time that the call center industry joined hands with the training industry and the two worked in collaboration.

Balaka Baruah Aggarwal