Indian Call Centers

It has been wet this last month, the back of the awful drought is well and truly broken. Whatever the new weather pattern is, it is bringing moisture. Now that winter is here, is is also going to bring something else. They say there will be an inch of snow tonight, maybe three inches in the hills to the Northwest. First snow. Just in time for Thanksgiving. Virginians can’t drive in the rain, much less in anything frozen, so it will be good to stay off the roads until most of them have spun off into the woods.

I was listening to the BBC this morning as I always do, feeling a little woozey from staying up late to watch the Monday Night Football game. John Madden is a great addition to the lineup- he was tearing apart a TurDuCin with his hands in the third quarter. A TurDuCin is a de-boned Turkey stuffed with a de-boned duck stuffed with a de-boned chicken, with two different dressings. I watched in a sort of horror as Madden’s giant hands split the turkey down the breast line, and then took the greasy light-pen and diagrammed how the carving should be done, split down the middle and then side-to-side. It was more than a little unsettling and I decided to go to bed before any other strange images were shown.

This morning we have established the new Homeland Defense Department out of twenty-two independent agencies with 177,000 employees. Maybe this will work, although I imagine we are going to lose more of our liberty in the consolidation of information. The next story from BBC was about explosive growth is reported in Bangalore this morning in a strange industry. Dozens of Indian graduates are starting work in the evening, sitting down at consoles and donning headsets. Although it is dusk on the Subcontinent, these young people are going to work as the sun comes up over North America. The industry is growing at 50-75% per year. Because of the increased connectivity, business has found that on every criteria, calls answered, problems solved, they can get the same service in India for 40% less than they would pay in the UK or in the States. It is compelling.

The whole thing is transparent to the consumer. There is a crash course in the vernacular language of the target market. They say the service industry will employ two million people to do the simple repetitive work. They are supposed to be able to do one hundred transactions per shift. It is tough work. Most people can only handle it for two years before they leave, move on to something else. That is one of the reason Bill Gates was in town, dispensing some of his personal fortune for the abatement of AIDS on the sub-continent.

Bangalore has a highly literate work force, and they write a lot of computer code for Mr. Gates and others like him. It would be interesting to see what little applications are written into all those millions of lines of code. But you could not pay an American enough money to sit down and look at it all. If the code runs on the personal computer, that is good enough for Microsoft. But contemplate sometime about your bank running commercial software that has not been fully validated. You never know what little applications might be running in the background.

I remember a story about a programmer for Honeywell, back at the dawn of the computer age. He ran a little program that harvested the decimal dust of the rounded penny on market transactions. Dust so small that no one notices the “rounding” error. The dust was shunted off to the programmer’s personal bank account. Based on the amount of money that was processed, this turned into quite a tidy sum. Eventually he was found out, of course, and fired. He was not prosecuted, since the company was reluctant to shake the public confidence in their accounting system. But there was one other little application. When his employee number failed to show up on the weekly payroll list, the computer dumped all the code he had written and deleted it forever. Who said geeks don’t have a sense of humor?

You have probably noticed the trend in the Service industry, the somewhat liquid tone in a voice, the odd cadence. I always ask the question when I call up a service center. “Where are you guys?” I say. They seem to appreciate the interest. My IBM service center is in Toronto. I make a point of asking how the Mapleleafs are doing this season. My credit card service center is in Belfast, Maine. Belfast was a sleepy little fishing town on the Penobscott Bay until the MBNA Bank people moved in. Used to be down at the heels, and you would occasionally see a bird that had escaped from the processing plant racing through the streets, seeking salvation. Now the place is a high-tech and gentrified. I tell them I like the new park where the old chicken-processing plant had been located. They seem surprised that I know about the park, but that is globalization for you. You never know who you are talking to or where.

The savings are so much bigger in a place like Bangalore that it is only a natural for the service industry to move offshore. The only limiting factor is the ability to speak English. India is again a natural. Study of the English language begins when kids are twelve. As much as the Government doesn’t like it, English is the lingua franca of the subcontinent. There has been a move to replace the official language of the Raj with Hindi, and the roman characters with the flowing elegance of Sanscrit script, but the residents down south will not give up their indigenous tongues for that of another conqueror from the North. The British are comfortably gone and are no threat to come back. There will be no standardization of language on other terms than that of the Queen’s English.

Which makes the call centers possible. The recent graduates have command of English. They need money, and they are willing to don the headsets for a couple years to get started. There is the potential for unlimited growth. Well, it is limited. But only by the number of people who can speak the language. Next time you are calling up somebody to report a problem or order a new service, ask where they are sitting. The answer might surprise you. I am going to look up Bangalore on the web and find out the name of their local cricket team.

In a global economy, you never know when these things are going to come in handy.

Copyright 2002 Vic Socotra