Outsourcing to India Bad For Indians’ Health
Posted by Cottontimer on 30 Apr 2006 | Tagged as: London, News and Current Events
One of the biggest complaints the Brits seem to have about call centers is reaching the ones based in India. In our continuing quest to get Wanadoo to fix our broadband (now 1 month and 2 days since we lost it), I’ve learned never to call tech support in the late afternoon, evenings, or weekends because the chances of getting someone in India is much higher.
Because the staff in India are less well trained than the staff in the UK, they tend to follow the script and only the script, making me run through all the scenarios then just telling me some garbage to get me off the phone. If I call on weekday mornings around 9 a.m., I always get someone in the UK call center who doesn’t need to follow a script and seems to understand the problem very well. Not that they’ve managed to help me yet.
I’m glad I haven’t been too abusive, though. The Times (UK) reports:
A study of Indian call-centre workers based in Bombay found the majority suffer from “burn-out stress syndrome”–physical and mental illness–as a result of abuse they receive from people they cold-call in Britain, America and Australia. The Global South Research Group survey says that Australians as the worst abusers, followed by Americans. Britons tend to be the least offensive.
How do you feel when you’ve reached an outsourced call center?
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I’ve had both helpful and unhelpful people from the UK and from India, so in my experience India isn’t any worse. In fact some of the most unhelpful call centre people I’ve encountered were British… Sometimes Indian people speak English with an accent and I have a little bit of trouble understanding them, but then some British call centres are in Scotland and it’s tough there too.
My cousin worked with GE’s call centre. She worked nights for two years straight. And it’s not like 7pm to 1am, it’s 9pm to 6am type of shift. It completely destroyed her health. She became obese, and her temper… oh her temper is short all the time. When I head to India, people find call centers being outsourced to India a “God sent”. I find it killing the health of those invovled and they are just blind since it pays so much better! A day will come when there will be a whole generation that is just exhausted but filthy rich!
The other thing too is, holidays. These groups celebrate American or British or whatever country they are serving holidays and don’t get their local holidays. The long term effects of culture not only health will be affected.
I hope this trend of call centers fades and India garners its entrepreneural spirit and bulges there instead.
So many places have computerized systems that make it impossible to even TALK to a human, that when I get a real live person on the other end, I am happy. Even if their accent is a bit hard to understand.
Am?lie: Oh, yes! There are so many accents here in the UK that it had my head spinning when I first arrived. Watching the BBC children’s show, Balamory, has helped with the Scottish accent.
Smitha: I remember hearing about your cousin.
It’s really awful when it affects your family directly.
Deb L: That’s a good point. Fortunately, the computerized systems here don’t seem to go on for too long. But they do charge for tech support phone calls! They’re not toll free!!!