Well what is the picture that comes to the mind once we hear the word Call centers.Young guys and girls fresh from college slugging it out in their cubicles with the head phones firmly attached giving advice, selling products in general helping their customers who are sitting hundreds of miles away.
You spend an hour there and you will feel you are in America(mostly call centres in India cater to American clients). Names are changed so that the clients won’t have to twist their tongues to pronounce our Indian names.Accents are changed("got to" becomes "gonna" and many more like that) so that the customers will feel at home.Even at 8 o’clock in the night here in India the guys have to address their customers beginning with Good morning.
Most importantly what is the work that they do.Help someone with anything and everything from washing machines to computers, help people in locating their lost items and stuff like that. For doing this work they get paid quite well and hence no body is complaining.Because we in India need one thing more than anything else i.e Generation of employment for the thousands of graduates every year.Call centres provide excellent opportunities for graduates who want to earn quick money. The only required skill is one should be confident and should be able to speak proper English(which is then distorted to a more Americanized version).
Then what’s wrong with it?
Go and ask a guy who actually works there or has worked there for quite some time. I have friends working in renowned call centers.The feedback I get is not that encouraging.It seems if you don’t get anything else then you start considering a call centre job.Why?there are quite a few reasons for that.
1. The attrition rates in call centre industry is the highest across all the other industries. That is because people get frustrated with the work.I mean handling dumb people day in and day out and in addition to that listening to their racist remarks(It’s the general American public I am talkin about who are quite bugged by this whole outsourcing phenomenon) is not fun for everyone.
- They sleep in the daytime and work in the nights .So where is the time left to pursue any other thing like higher studies or search for some other more meaningful jobs.
3.There is very little job satisfication as it does nothing to promote the creativity of the individual.
4.The experience that you have there is not considered valid anywhere else.
Hence the start of the road is rosy for call centre executives but sooner than later they get fed up with it.But talking from a macro point of view keeping the whole Indian economy in picture It is one of the best things that has happened in the last five years.
Hence call centers are a necessary evil.
Do let me know your thoughts on this.