Overheard at iWay:

Well, I know it is absolutely nasty to overhear something. But someone beside you in a net cafe, just a few yards away, laughs his way to glory and yaps at top his voice is impossible to ignore. I first thought that the few guys sitting in the next system to my side were just showing off their decibel levels. They were the ones who were managing the whole net cafe. One of them kept talking a lot and the other two were a sharing a headphone, one per ear.

After some giggles and ‘wow’s, I finally decided to see their system what they were upto. They were listening to an audio track in Winamp and ‘heck’, I thought. But the guy who was doing all the talking, made me even more curious. They were a bunch of younsters who worked for a Call Center. Each one had a nick name which was american and they answered to the customer calls and provided them support. Since these guys used a IP Telephone, they answer calls through a PC. And these naughty guys recorded their customer call as audio files, uploaded them to the net and downloaded them at the net cafe and were having fun laughing at it. It didn’t sound a funny thing to me. And they were also making nasty comments about the female customers. One guy said when one of his female customer demanded an explanation, he had called her by names in vernacular language, which obviously she didn’t understand. If this is what we desi’s are upto, then the future of call centers are a BIG ????

Also the companies, for ex : Companq, Hp, AOL etc.. which have call centers, can be honest enough to their customers back in US. They can say that they have a 24/7 support center at India. This would stop having these guys to have a nick name which sounds ridiculous. When I spoke to those guys after they told, they need to attend 100 calls a day and then they can do anything. And they also said because of this they are in constant pressure of taking 100 calls and also finishing it as soon as possible. They accepted that they don’t provide their fullest service to the clients, reason being this target of 100 calls. They guy named Karthik had a nick of Jason and Ramaswamy was called Rich. Sounds stupidish…

They are also sure that they can’t make a career out of this call center jobs. Their attitude was like going to a temp job till they settle down with HCL, TCS or Wipro as software consultants. This atittude is dangerous for the company also because they would not be able to extract the fullest productivity. One of them told he gets good girl friends there and girls are in dozens there. He is able to take atleast one on a date, everyweek. He said all what a call center company looks for is English and anyne who has a degree from a university can talk his way out. The additional qualification is to spend 1500 bucks to one of the institutes in T.Nagar to get the american accent in one and half months.

With IT enabled services becoming the biggest grosser of this year and also in the coming years, we have to get more serious about this business. Else we will be left out in this rat race with china.