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Re: Starting an Indian Call Center, Part 2: The Challenges
Posted by: Anthony Mitchell 2005-06-28 12:17:47
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Challenges facing new offshore call centers can spill over and impact clients and customers of those clients. Driven by cost considerations and the availability of personnel, U.S. firms are increasingly turning to offshore call centers -- but are often doing so without fully understanding the constraints facing those facilities, especially the newer, smaller call centers, which must overcome initial technology problems, progress out of entry-level programs, and distinguish themselves from established market players before they can truly meet client demand.Jones
Re: Starting an Indian Call Center, Part 2: The Challenges
Posted by: mkp 2005-07-04 23:32:09 In reply to: Anthony Mitchell
let me share with this group my personal experience. Due to some constraints at the moment i would not like to state my name or the name of the company.
I having worked all my career (till now) in some of the best organizations in the world, decided to take up a risky challenge of joining up with an Indian organization, a family ownership organization who wanted to start a BPO / Contact Center. So I joined up as the head of the division as their COO. Now we all have read / are aware of multiple stories of how the corporate world senior executives just can not work with the Indian ownership firms, yet these guys were just too good in putting up a rosy picture and I joined them and relocated to Hyderabad. Yes "HYDERABAD" wonder how many times would this city come-up in talks for all wrong experiences. This city is so full of potential but because of a few people I guess gets highlighted for such incidents quite often.
Within first few days I started realizing that this company lacked in ethics and a lot of stuff was being spoken to key people like clients and even investors, that was not true.
And here was a company that wanted to set-up a contact center and handle Global clients..!!
Well I have since decided to give-up this assignment and rather look for a similar task with a multinational company or get some funding and set-up a truly world class center myself and let the world know that in India there are still people who can set-up good BPO business, like Raman Roy and Sanjeev Agarwal did.
I think bodies like NASCOM must play a more critical role. Maybe clients must consider the contact centers that are registered and approved by NASCOM and for this NASCOM must have some strict parameters like Management team comprising of individual with relevant experience, vet out the company and people policies etc.
In my own opinion, the biggest challenge that the new Indian contact center start-ups face is a lack of management skills required to deal in a Global atmosphere, amongst the neo rich Indians who are trying to go Global. The desire and passion is beyond question in such individuals but what they lack is the ability to break-free of the old traditional way of working..."every thing themselves without the relevant knowledge" or infrastructure. Like this company wanted me to sign up contracts for Outbound processes even before they have invested in a dialer. ..?? Saying… “don’t worry we will get one or manage with a ‘open harbor’ kind of a dialer …”
I having worked all my career (till now) in some of the best organizations in the world, decided to take up a risky challenge of joining up with an Indian organization, a family ownership organization who wanted to start a BPO / Contact Center. So I joined up as the head of the division as their COO. Now we all have read / are aware of multiple stories of how the corporate world senior executives just can not work with the Indian ownership firms, yet these guys were just too good in putting up a rosy picture and I joined them and relocated to Hyderabad. Yes "HYDERABAD" wonder how many times would this city come-up in talks for all wrong experiences. This city is so full of potential but because of a few people I guess gets highlighted for such incidents quite often.
Within first few days I started realizing that this company lacked in ethics and a lot of stuff was being spoken to key people like clients and even investors, that was not true.
And here was a company that wanted to set-up a contact center and handle Global clients..!!
Well I have since decided to give-up this assignment and rather look for a similar task with a multinational company or get some funding and set-up a truly world class center myself and let the world know that in India there are still people who can set-up good BPO business, like Raman Roy and Sanjeev Agarwal did.
I think bodies like NASCOM must play a more critical role. Maybe clients must consider the contact centers that are registered and approved by NASCOM and for this NASCOM must have some strict parameters like Management team comprising of individual with relevant experience, vet out the company and people policies etc.
In my own opinion, the biggest challenge that the new Indian contact center start-ups face is a lack of management skills required to deal in a Global atmosphere, amongst the neo rich Indians who are trying to go Global. The desire and passion is beyond question in such individuals but what they lack is the ability to break-free of the old traditional way of working..."every thing themselves without the relevant knowledge" or infrastructure. Like this company wanted me to sign up contracts for Outbound processes even before they have invested in a dialer. ..?? Saying… “don’t worry we will get one or manage with a ‘open harbor’ kind of a dialer …”
