From: Suresh Ramasubramanian <suresh@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
More on outsourcing call centers to India.
I don't really agree with these points the guy makes, for much the same
reasons that I stated in a previous thread (about the republican party
outsourcing election telemarketing to an Indian call center) that you posted.
The root of the problem is NOT, as Mr.Das so glibly states, a feeling of
outrage about kids from Bangalore pretending that they are from Boston,
right down to getting themselves faked names, putting on faked accents and
boning up on baseball and american football trivia to chat with chatty
clients (when cricket and soccer are far, far more popular in India)
The problem is that call centers and the rest of the outsourced jobs
coming into India are way down the value chain, and only interested in
leveraging the fact that the Indian rupee is worth just under two cents US
at current exchange rates. So, jobs that'd rate as the online equivalent
of burger flipping at a MacDonalds stateside are given to kids who get
wildly inflated salaries here for jobs that require not much more than
basic skills like using MS Office and speaking american / just sending
back canned replies using a CRM (customer relationship management) application.
So, while Indian companies fight to stay at the bottom end of the value
chain, and still pretend that it is something much better by wildly
overpaying their employees, sooner or later they will find out what
happens when someone with more favorable exchange rates and far cheaper
manpower (like, say, China or the Phillipines) starts competing for this.
Then, I have seen even engineering grads get into call centers thanks to
spiraling unemployment elsewhere, or simply to kill time for a year before
going on to do a masters degree / get a better paying job. All that
talent going into mindless drudgery at a call center could be far better
spent developing IP, or at least doing something more productive.
Call centers do have the image of a resume killer ... quite a lot of
people will not even list a call center on their CVs lest their next job,
and their subsequent career, be locked into an endless cycle of call
centers. A lot of my friends (fresh out of college, back then, when call
centers were just starting to boom a few years ago) preferred to skip the
year or so they worked on a call center from their CV, preferring to state
that they took a year off to seriously prepare for exams for higher
studies (GRE, GMAT, CAT <- the fiercely competitive Indian equivalent of
GMAT or whatever).
--
Suresh Ramasubramanian <suresh@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Manager, Outblaze Antispam & Security Operations