Call Center

India, for example, with its large population of English speaking people who take up employment in such call centers has now become one of the most popular countries in the world offering this service. The main reason one finds this has come about is because of the lower labour costs one has to pay for people’s services in these countries compared to the USA. The second reason is all the modern technology in telecommunications, such as VOIP, and all the software that has been developed over the last 20 years in this field has made this possible.

However, there are two very big bones of contention resulting from this practice, and they are the complaints customers seem to have about the accents of the staff manning these call centers. This is, of course not all that serious in this age of globalisation and eventually this problem will go away. In the meantime, customers still feel more at ease dealing with someone perceived to be from their neighbourhood than someone foreign from the other side of the world.

Whether this is valid or not does not matter because in the eyes of business the customer is always seen to be right!

The second problem one comes across is the on-going complaint that jobs are been taken away from home-grown Americans, and the workers now doing those jobs are in fact being paid for their work by those very same people who are also customers of those businesses using those call centers.

Well changing the attitude of business and expecting them to employ local labour at a higher cost for the same results they get elsewhere is not only unreasonable, but totally unfeasible considering they are in business to make a profit. However, offer business an alternative whereby they could have the same results (or better) at the same or lower costs and you would have a situation where these companies will more than happily switch over or change.

How can this be achieved? Simply by making small changes to the same technology and software that made the setting up of call centers all over the world possible and redefining the job descriptions of those who will handle the calls.

With VOIP and all the telephone technology we have today calls don’t have to be routed to one worker in a call center, they could be sent to a worker sitting at home. A part-time worker could now do the work originally done by an employee in a call center from home. Because the employee no longer has to commute to work, spend money on a wardrobe of ‘work cloths’ and can work flexi-time that suits their routine, they are now in a position to offer business their services at a lower rate. As mentioned earlier the job description would change and this could become a suitable position for experience older people to supplement their pensions or women taking a break from work to raise their children.

Although most would not even think there were problems attached to the global existence of Call Centers we now know these problems could be solved with a little creative effort!