British callers may be infuriated when they discover that the company they are telephoning has moved its customer service centre to India.

 

But their frustration is as nothing compared with the heart attacks, ulcers and insomnia afflicting those on the other end of the line.

 

Research carried out by India's booming call centre industry has found the 1.6 million people who work in them, mostly in their twenties, are plagued by ailments arising from the stress of dealing with irate customers.

 

The Indian government is so concerned about the problem that it is preparing to launch a health strategy for the workers.

 

A study conducted by Strathclyde University for the Union of IT Enabled Services, which informally represents call centre workers, found that 77 per cent felt "very" pressurised and 45 per cent identified difficult customers as the main source of their stress.

 

The salaries paid by the call centre industry have transformed the lives of a generation of young, middle-class Indians, giving them independence and money to spend on shopping, eating out, holidays and parties, but the price is proving high.

 

"Youngsters love spending the kind of money their parents only dreamt about, but I'm worried that stress and illness will turn them into zombies," said Karthik Shekhar, the union's general secretary.

 

The report, to be published later this month, supports the findings of a health survey by the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations which found that the outsourcing industry was most at risk from diseases that would hit productivity.

 

Researchers estimated that heart disease, strokes and diabetes would cost India more than £100 billion in lost productivity over the next 10 years.

Staff in call centres dealing with customers in Britain say they have been shocked at the ferocity of the verbal attacks they encounter.

 

Nidhi Aggarwal, 24, said she had never heard some of the insulting language used - including the word "**k*" as a term of abuse - before she began taking orders for a British catalogue company, which routes its customers' calls to a Bangalore call centre.

 

"At first, I thought I'd get used to it, but it's been a year now and it's not getting easier," she said.

"On its own, maybe I could cope with the abuse, but there's also the stress of finishing calls in one minute and hardly having time for breaks."

 

Miss Aggarwal, an English graduate, said she planned to quit, tired of wishing customers a good morning only to hear: "Oh, I'm through to India am I? Put me through to someone who can understand English, you f****** cow."

 

Some companies offer counselling to employees to help them overcome psychological problems.

Archana Bishta, who runs the 1to1help.net advice service in Bangalore, said she had helped workers who were suicidal or having a nervous breakdown.

"Most call centre workers live in big cities, away from home, so they have no family support," she said.

 

"Dealing with angry customers can make them very emotionally fragile. They blow their top or cry over the smallest thing."

The company's clients include IBM-Daksh, Dell International, CapGemini, Fidelity and Tesco Hindustan Service Centre, while other companies, such as Infosys Technologies in Bangalore, have set up 24-hour staff help lines, manned by ­psychologists.

 

Worried call centre managers have also provided cafés, sports facilities and gyms for their staff and offer neck massages, disco nights and picnics in an attempt to ease the pressure-cooker atmosphere.

 

But none of that helped Aradhana Kamath, 22, who left her job working for a British company's call centre in Noida last May, unable to stand the abuse from callers any longer.

 

"I think they were angry that their jobs had come to India. They were so emotional and angry, it was like instant hatred. I'd want to cry but I couldn't, I had to take the next call," said Miss Kamath.

 

Anbumani Ramadoss, the health minister, has promised to introduce a policy specifically for the call centre industry.

"Teenagers straight out of school and college, looking to make a fast buck, are collapsing in front of their computers," he said.

 

A spokeswoman for Tesco confirmed the company had a contract with the counselling service in Bangalore, which was available to staff to discuss all kinds of personal problems, not just those related to their employment.

 

Source: Sunday Telegraph

I don't agree with the people being abusive to the advisors one bit - however, I've made it a policy that ANY company I am a customer of that has call centres in India - I leave.

 

The reason? The Indian advisors are poorly trained (I worked for BT.... so I know the second-rate training the Indian advisors get). They aren't too great speaking English. They seem almost always unable to deal efficiently with your call.

 

Indian call centres are turning into a HUGE white elephant for the companies using them.

 

Yes, it amounts to slave labour and it saves them money.

 

BUT - it's a colossal customer turn-off. BT, especially, are finding out that Indian call centres are losing them hundreds of thousands of customers - several surveys have revealed that people would be happy to pay more if the company decided on British-only call centres.

 

Nice idea and good fopr these money-grabbing conglomerates. But it's a short-term saving when customers decide to up ship and go elsewhere.

they can't even pronounce my last name which annoys the hell out of me, it isn't hard.

They don't deserve that treatment of course they don't, it's the company that these people are angry at after all... not the people on the phone (unless the person on the phone is not understanding them, but still when it comes down to it it's the company who's responsible for having Indian call centres in the first place).

 

The last time I encountered an Indian call centre I was trying to book a train ticket home. Pronouncing and then spelling out the name of each stop, my name, address and credit card details to someone who I could barely understand was not a fun process :arrr:

It is not the fault of the workers but I can understand the frustration of the public who have to call these call centres

 

When NTL was Indian call centre it was like

 

"Hello NTL Abdul speaking how may I help you" "hello Abdul my name is Mr Thompson and I am having trouble connecting to the internet" "Mr Thomas what is your account number ?" "No, it is Thompson !!" "can you spell that please "Sure, T H..........."and you feel like going aaaaaaaarrrrrrrggggghhhhhh and thats before have even explained what the problem is and then once they have understood you at the 10th time of repeating yourself they read out stuff from a pre arranged script and tell you it might be your pc and so on :manson:

 

I can understand the frustration of callers although of course there is no need for abuse, but like Russ now I will not place any business with a company that has indian customer service

Also, the BT call centres in Delhi have a phenomenally high rate of 'lost' calls - these are when they either put you on hold or try to transfer you - then simply lose the call or deliberately cut you off - usually, in BT's case, when it's taken a customer up to 10 minutes to actually speak to someone after making the call.

 

When the Delhi call centre managed out of hours calls... ie weekends and evenings - the amount of complaints received after these periods in BT was sky-high.

 

Yet, BT still never seem to learn or listen to their customers and fully deserves its nickname given by its own staff - Bangladeshi Telecom.

I agree that it's not the Workers fault, they're just doing there jobs. But I can also sympathise with the British Callers. Like Craig said, when you're calling someone up about something that's annoying you and getting on your nerves the last thing you want to be doing is going "Can you repeat that" or "Can you spell that" etc... You just want it done without any hassle, and prefrebly as quick as possible.

Clearly there should be no excuse for any human to react and abuse Indian call workers.

 

As Russ said, the best way to react is by moving your business to a company that does not employ Indian call workers so that the fat cats running the business get the message rather than abusing someone over the phone thousand of miles away who is earning a relative pittance.

I work for an IT helpdesk for a company and we get calls from employees only. We have a call centre in India and also in the UK. I also get to speak to the employees in India as well as the UK. You can see a big difference when you speak to each call centre. The UK call centre can be really impatient, stroppy and rude. The Indian call centre employees are really pleasent and chirpy!! I feel really sorry for them with all the slack they get from UK customers but I also hate when companies want to save pennies and open a call centre in India. They get paid nothing compared to the employees in the UK. It's quite sad. -_-

I think the Indian call center thing is just an excuse half the time. I have two or three friends who have worked call centers here and in Canada. They get as much abuse as you can imagine, cursing and shrieking and nasty insults and such. ALL THE TIME. It's the nature of the job - as a representative of a huge, faceless corporation, you are held accountable for all the problems people have. And communications companies are usually the absolute worst in costumer service.

 

Want to know the worst example of corporate penny-pinching though? Many fast food places now connect you to a call center when you announce your order into the speaker at the car drive-thru. It goes to a center 3000 miles away and the order is then fed back to the kitchen. I guess they can pay call center staff even less than McDonalds staff...

There's never any excuse to insult or abuse people, but I can share the frustration of those who've made calls and realised they're reached a call centre in India. On more than one occasion, I honestly haven't been able to understand what they're saying so it makes it so difficult to have any sort of conversation.

I have spent the past 7 weeks trying to get my home internet connection back up and running with my ISP which has an indian call centre. They lost my fax application twice and denied ever receiving it, its been horrid as it was supposed to be a 5-8 day process. Sure its not their fault but they are aweful to deal with because their english language skills are just not good enough. I have sympathy for them and believe its the company owners who are to blame for this dodgy service as they moved their call centre's to india because its cheaper, not caring that they dont have advanced enough english skills which leads to frustrated customers.

There's never any excuse to insult or abuse people,

 

i have NO sympathy for them.

 

now i just tell them..whoever they may be... to fcuk off.

 

im sick of getting upto 12 fcukin calls in 3 hours! (until i went on that site and took my number off). i hate dropping everything to answer the phone, NO i dont want a financial makeover, NO i dont want to borrow money, NO i dont want another mobile phone...etc... the trouble is, they dont take NO for an answer! they persist, i have calls from the very same company in the same evening! even though i say 'no' . so in the begining i was courteous.... but not now.

i have NO sympathy for them.

 

now i just tell them..whoever they may be... to fcuk off.

 

im sick of getting upto 12 fcukin calls in 3 hours! (until i went on that site and took my number off). i hate dropping everything to answer the phone, NO i dont want a financial makeover, NO i dont want to borrow money, NO i dont want another mobile phone...etc... the trouble is, they dont take NO for an answer! they persist, i have calls from the very same company in the same evening! even though i say 'no' . so in the begining i was courteous.... but not now.

 

 

I think the discussion was more about customer service centres where YOU ring up for help, rather than cold-callers.

I'm with you on cold-callers though; the one job I would NEVER consider doing.

If I have a problem, then I'd rather speak to someone local on the phone. As it's been said, many of the Asian call centre staff aren't given adequate training.

 

I know this is slightly different, but in my job, when opening Credit Card accounts, you have to call a centre which is in India. As they have been inadequately trained, and trained only in certain areas, they fail to understand concepts such as, people living in a numbered building on a street, which is a flat, which also comes with a flat number; people who live at named houses; peoples' surname's which begin with 'Mc'.

 

It is so embarrassing having to decline minted customers <_<

I think the discussion was more about customer service centres where YOU ring up for help, rather than cold-callers.

I'm with you on cold-callers though; the one job I would NEVER consider doing.

 

i wanted a rant :)

A lot of Aussie banks and credit companies are using Indian call centres too. It seems a global phenomenon.

 

I don't know why, but when I'm transferred to the call centre, we always end up shouting at each other like we are calling overseas lol.

Thats usually when the gig is up that they aren't local indians in Oz but in India!!

 

I watched a documentary about indian call centres and they dont have very much training. Just a few weeks and that is it.

Besides the language barrier, the locality and cultural barrier, there is also the barrier that they really aren't that trained in the product that they are servicing. Which results in usually a very unsatisfactory experience.

 

Many people have boycotted banks that use them, but now all of them do and there is no more competitors to move to.

The banks seem to think that if they are all using them, then we would get used to it.

Needless to say we haven't.

I thinkit's disgusting the way people who work in call centers are treated. No wonder they feel like $h!t, even people on here admit to giving them abuse. As if that's going to help you |=

 

In the end they're just doing their job, they don't deserve what they get, Indian or not.

I thinkit's disgusting the way people who work in call centers are treated. No wonder they feel like $h!t, even people on here admit to giving them abuse. As if that's going to help you |=

 

In the end they're just doing their job, they don't deserve what they get, Indian or not.

 

so do you call 'doing their job' giving you not one, not two, but three calls in any one evening from the very same centre after at first you politely refused?..... i call it 'taking the p1ss'.

 

 

I thinkit's disgusting the way people who work in call centers are treated. No wonder they feel like $h!t, even people on here admit to giving them abuse. As if that's going to help you |=

 

In the end they're just doing their job, they don't deserve what they get, Indian or not.

 

While I would never abuse someone who I call up at a call centre anyone that phones me up at home selling me stuff I don't want is fair game as far as I am concerned, I don't want my personal space invaded by anyone trying to sell me stuff especially in the evening when I am relaxing after a days work, so anyone who does gets told to f*** off and literally, I wish I had a whistle I could blow down the phone to the buggers