India has last laugh in call centre sitcom

It is no laughing matter for anyone trying to call their bank and finding themselves mired in misunderstanding with a call centre 4,000 miles away.

Critics complain that overseas centres have taken 50,000 UK jobs, and that the advisers, paid a fraction of their British equivalents, are often unfamiliar with our culture.

At the other end of the telephone, however, it seems things are very different. A sitcom to be broadcast later this year takes a look at call centres from the Indian perspective – and British callers do not emerge with much credit. Many are depicted as racist and abusive.

One episode of The Call Centre is devoted to hate calls from people angry at their jobs being “offshored” or “Bangalored”, and spewing racist taunts at the long-suffering Indians.

American callers come off even worse. The programme, produced by India’s leading news channel NDTV, recreates a real incident when an American radio show host rang an Indian call centre, pretended to order hair beads for his daughter and then began.

Overall, British callers were “calmer and gentler” than Americans. “You get filthy anger boiling up straight away,” he said. “I know it is frustrating, people trying to sell you things you don’t want, and I can understand people being rude. But why get racist?” shouting, ‘You f****** Indian bitch, what the f*** are you calling me for?’ “

In the sitcom, the call centre staff handle credit card inquiries and computer problems. In one scene, an American looking at pornography on the internet calls for help because he can’t switch off his computer. “Try shutting all the windows,” the Indian tells him. The American says “hold on” and goes off to shut the windows in his flat.

One director, said: “Americans emerge as the most foul-mouthed and stupid in the episodes filmed so far.”

The sitcom is the first to be set in an office: Indian soaps and sitcoms are usually set in homes and revolve around traditional family themes.

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A call center is “…a physical location where calls are placed, or received, in high volume tor the purpose of sales, marketing, customer service, telemarketing, technical support or other specialized business activity” (2).

Call centers are used for patient recruitment in clinical trials.Advertisements describing the study and the type of patients needed are placed in local media such as newspapers, radio, or newsletters.

The telephone number of the call center is listed in the ad, and call center personnel answer the resulting telephone calls from recruits.

There are over 50,000 call centers in the United States. Some are stand-alone organizations, while others are departments within a larger organization.

Specialized call centers serving the medical and pharmaceutical industries may be owned and operated by pharmaceutical companies (trial sponsors), contract research organizations (CRO), site management organizations (SMO) or independent call center operators.

Trial sponsors or research sites often out-source part of the patient recruitment process to an existing call center.

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By any measure, call centres are a growing business, with many large organisations looking to them as the primary way of interacting with their customers.Call centres provide many business advantages, including: improved efficiency, increased hours of operation, reduced costs and greater flexibility.

Perhaps the greatest challenge of running a call centre, however, is ensuring that customers are provided with the right information in a timely fashion.

Knowledge management (KM) has a number of practical tools and strategies for meeting this challenge, and call centre managers have much to gain by exploring KM principles.
Call centre challenges

A call centre is confronted with a number of considerable challenges:

* Potentially wide range of customer enquiries.
* Legal accountability for information provided to customers.
* Customers expect ‘instant’ answers to questions.
* High stress work environment for call centre operators.
* Large and complex body of knowledge to be learned by new staff.
* High staff turnover.
* Constant pressure to reduce call handling times.
* Continuous tracking and assessment of efficiency measures.

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Can we think a Call Centers on Mars ? This is a very interesting and valuable question for us If yes then how can we provide the services to the Customer about Mars, Perfect for “off-word outsourcing”.

This is not very easy but if a Call Center stands to give this type of Call Centers Services then this will be very high competition to the others Call Centers.

The Mars Rovers’ continued exploration of the surface of Mars, it occurs to me that soon, we may have an excellent answer to the outsourcing question.

Want low overhead, a not-very-penetrated labor market, good weather (excellent for disaster recovery) and little competition from other call centers? Why not try Mars, the perfect answer for off-world outsourcing?

Of course, the commute could be a little problematic, but thats’s the only drawback I see.
Studies show two things about customer-relationship management: It will remain the hottest area of information-technology spending for years to come—and most of the billions of dollars spent thus far on customer-relationship-management systems, or CRM, have been wasted.
A Company can make good Customer Relation Ship and can find good customer by provide the service Call Center on Mars.

Really this is a good idea to give the service to the customer about Call Center On Mars.

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Call Centers India Inc.
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There are many factors that make STRESS for Call Center employees. There are some main factors that create a stressful Call Centre but the main and most effective factor for employees is Working Hours stress for a Call center employee.

• Irregular sleeping / working hours

• Time pressure
• The demands of serving the customer in real-time
• High Call volume
• High expectations
• High work targets

Working in night is the greatest cause for stress, not surprising considering that the industry works largely during the night to coincide with the UK and US daylight hours. Certainly, there are daytime shifts but the night remains the peak load period. As a result, 38.4% of all respondents interviewed said their work shifts caused serious stress. This average however covers the fact that some of those interviewed would be day-timers—either call floor employees who work the day shift or senior non-call floor people

Not surprisingly, newcomers had the toughest time of it all. Surprisingly, more men complained than women did. Team leaders who work the shift of their call center executives and usually put in extra hours for company/management meetings also had significantly more problems than other experience groups. In the end, there are three key issues here:

• No other Call Center industry in the world faces this problem as India does.
• The extent of its impact is large and is a major cause of high attrition.
• There are no easy answers to this problem and these work timings aren’t in the very nature of the job in India.

Managing Stress in the Ever-Changing Call Center Increasing customer expectations, a fast-paced environment, constant demands, and what seems like a never-ending stream of changes – add it all together, toss in a few extra ingredients (like repetitive tasks and a lack of the right tools) and what do you get? More than likely STRESS and not the good kind!

So how do you spell RELIEF? What can you as a manager/supervisor/team leader do for your teams and for yourselves, to help alleviate some of the “bad stress” before it becomes burnout and turnover?

Stress won’t vanish on its own! Join your peers to discuss ways to decrease stress in your center and experience increased employee satisfaction and lower attrition.

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Call Centers India Inc.
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You can see the difference: the agents are more mature, better educated, and more experienced than the average call center agent. As independent contractors, Mostly agents enjoy the self-directed entrepreneurial nature of their work, and as a result less than 25% of the agents stop providing services during a given time.Call Center
Agents have their different nature with customer, but this is must to be polite for a Call Center Agent.

The screening process must be reliable and exhaustive for a Call
Center to find the better and stable customer. Now one discussion topic for a Good Call Center
is :

Handling Abusive Callers in the Call Center

That article commented on a trend in Indian call centers toward giving agents more options in dealing with abusive callers. One Indian software industry expert who said, “Indians are by nature courteous towards foreigners, but there can be too much of a good thing and companies increasingly provide assertiveness training. If people felt in the past they had to be polite in the face of brazen rudeness, now they say, ‘I don’t think I do.’”

At call center how to handle abusive BPO customers, 10 tips from call center trainer / Team Leaders.

1. Speak calmly.
2. Learn to count to 10.
3. Politely ask the caller to speak slowly and clearly and to lower his voice.
4. Put the caller on hold for a few seconds if you need to recover your composure.
5. Keep a picture that helps you to stay calm in front of you — a peaceful scene or a photo of a loved one.
6. “Press the mute button and swear back,” while using “your sweetest tone” when actually speaking with the caller.
7. Ask the caller to refrain from using abusive language, if that’s permitted.
8. De-stress after a rough phone call — Fitter suggests yoga or breathing techniques.
9. If a call continues to get worse, escalate it to your supervisor.
10. Talk with your supervisor or group leader after a stressful day with difficult callers.

Most call centers face the ongoing problem of agent turnover and not having a qualified pool of talented agents available. A Good Call Center helps alleviate these problems enabling our customers to hire talented semi-retirees, home-bound, long-distance individuals as well as those that simply prefer to work from home versus a call center environment.

Customers trying to get through to call centres are getting impatient and quicker to hang up, a survey suggests.

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The term LPO is an acronym for “Legal Process Outsourcing” The definition of Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO)? A kind of high end BPO industry that has been growing rapidly in the recent years.

In Legal Process Outsorucing vendors or in-house departments of organisations outsource legal work from off-shore areas where it is costly to perform, say like United States of America, Europe, UK, Germany, Australia to cheaper destinations like India, Pakistan etc.

Even if the legal BPO market in India is negligible at the moment, the few services providers that have made the start have managed to provide good service and this can benefit new entrants who will have the confidence of their clients. In the near future, the legal BPO market in india can multiply rapidly and emerge as a strong segment in the overall BPO services in India
According to an estimate, the potential for legal outsourcing from the US alone is $3-4 billion. siliconindia.com quotes the latest Nasscom report on Legal BPO.

IN TODAY’S aggressive world of business, gaining effectiveness and staying profitable have become the corporate mantras. Most international law firms based in the US and
Europe is taking the Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO) route to be lucrative. Several international law firms, legal departments of large corporations and also state and federal government agencies are increasingly outsourcing their legal work to India to reduce cost and increase efficiency.

Similar to other BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) activities,

India’s legal services are affordable and efficient. Preparation of pleadings, docketing, proof-reading, transcription of recorded documents, litigation support and research, case studies and law firm marketing are various avenues of work that are being outsourced to
India.

Outsourcing legal work to India

costs up to 80 per cent less than the cost of using the services of American law firms.The benefit of the time zone, availability of English speaking attorneys and familiarity with common law doctrines attract foreign firms. Indian attorneys with US/UK qualifications are sought after. International attorneys are impressed not only by the labour cost differential, but also by the quality and speed of work done. Most LPO outfits in India are reported to be staffed 24/7.

However, given the advantages of Indian lawyers, experts believe that it is unlikely that other Asian countries will compete in this sector, as has been the case with call centres.

Indian companies also provide legal transcription services, which involve providing accurate tape and digital voice transcriptions. They transcribe audio files into wav, vox, dss and mp3 forms in less than 12 hours.

The LPO business will soon become a mainstream practice for many attorneys in India. Professionals with Indian law degrees, including paralegals, are assets to multinational law firms. Outsourcing helps the in-house counsel to concentrate on core legal issues while outsourcing research and managerial tasks at effective costs.

Conversely, the job is said to be repetitive and routine. Practising professionals and corporate attorneys refrain from undertaking tasks of research and case studies, as they do not add value and are not professionally challenging.

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EMPOWER YOUR EMPLOYEES TO BID ON THE SHIFTS THEY DESIRE

Shift Bidding goes beyond regular shift preference functionality. It empowers your agents to bid directly on the specific shifts they desire through online “auctions” using an innovative bonus point system in addition to agent seniority and rank.

How does it work?

First, before starting a shift bidding auction, you create a phantom schedule – or schedule template – for a particular campaign week. Then, you name the shift period(s) available for bidding, create a deadline for the bids, set the rules that will be used to process the bids automatically, and define the scoring system for the auction.

Shift Bidding is an Internet-based staffing program that centralizes the posting of open shifts system-wide. Shift Bidding is a system that is very helpful to the employees as well as for call centers and other organizations.

All qualified fulltime, part time and PRN employees who have been scheduled for their minimum scheduling commitment on their home unit are eligible to request additional shifts on their home unit as well as other units.

The bids can be open, serial, or a hybrid of the two. You also can award discretionary bonus points to agents based on criteria you select, such as their performance, completion of previous undesirable shifts, failure to have obtained requested shifts in the past, or just for participating in the auction. It’s all up to you.

To use Shift Bidding, you must register. This involves completing a profile questionnaire with some personal demographic information and skill competencies. Once you submit your profile, it is sent to your unit manager for approval. After your profile is approved and your manager has activated you, your sign on codes (user name and password) will give you access to requesting available shifts. If your home unit does not currently utilize Shift Bidding, contact the manager of the unit where you would like to request shifts

Now we can say that Shift Bidding is a good system for managing the efforts and revenue for the organization as well as beneficial for employees. Correspondence to provide your agents with input and greater control over their schedules. With Shift Bidding,your organization can build morale while reducing costly absenteeism and attrition. What’s more, your managers will spend less time developing schedules and more time on high-value activities, such as coaching your agents.

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Call Centers India Inc.
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While if we are going to open a franchisee for a Call Center, we should consider some key factors those will possess the quality of Call Center. And how Franchise operations support main center.

The Call Centre has developed a solution for franchised businesses, effectively taking the day-to day worries of running an operations centre out of the hands of franchise principals, allowing them to focus on their core businesses and the franchisees to maximise their productive time.

The key systems components that The Call Centre has harnessed to deliver the franchise solution are; Remedy Action Request service management application, Crystal Reporting, Microsoft Exchange, and SMS text messaging. A Call Center deliver the output from AR Remedy through Crystal Reports to provide franchise owners with formatted, professional Job sheets as they are created. The job sheets are emailed as created and an abbreviated text message of the job to the franchisee’s mobiles using SMS text messaging service. A daily summary of jobs booked and messages taken is also emailed each evening as a back-up.

Variations on this process have also been implemented including appointment-booking and also slightly lower value-add solutions based around message and call transfer transfer to individual franchise operations.

This outsourced solution has allowed these businesses to get on with doing what they do best, in the knowledge that their entire support systems are being taken care of, and that any changes to scope will be easily accommodated as they arise.

Franchise operations support centre

• The reasons we have found the Call Centre franchise support system to be so effective:
• Genuinely want to understand our business and add to our success
• Willing to work with us to change your system to meet our requirements at a reasonable cost
• Able to manage the franchisees diaries electronically and in real time
• Able to distribute email and text messages electronically in real time
• Manages the area allocation in real time
• Excellent conversion rate by following our processes and suggesting changes to improve these processes.
• Pro-active reporting enables us to manage our business, evaluate the success of our advertising and ensure the regularity of work. The current reporting is far superior to that provided by other call centres and at a level with enables us to conduct any further analysis we may require
• Very responsive to our requests and constantly keeping us informed of any issues or enquiries which may not be covered by our existing processes.

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Call Centers India Inc.
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Does anyone have any policies and ideas they implement about eating food in the call center? I want to say some ideas about call center food!! Mostly call centers employees use fast food in their routine. How much this is good for making environments for the call center?

I know my experience does not include food being eaten by staff members in a call center.I am hoping input from other professionals in the industry could better enlighten their challenge with this change in their work ethic.

A call center environment doesn’t allow for us to escape from smells. There are no doors to close, no fans to turn on, and no where to hide. Leftover salmon heated in a microwave may be a real treat for someone, but I for one don’t care to smell it for the next hour. Having a break room or area away from the call center floor and requiring that ALL food be confined to that area ensures that agents are not subjected to these doors. They can choose to avoid the break room if they don’t’ like the smells, but they can’t just walk away from the phones or their neighbor.

We’ve gone from a call centre where entire meals were eaten at work stations to a “zero food but beverages in covered cups” environment. There was very little pain implementing this change because we communicated to the employees that it is important to us that they take their well-deserved break and lunches

Eating on the call floor isn’t just a representative’s issue; it’s also a management issue. We need to lead by example. I know that managers say that they eat at their desk because they are so busy. I think I’m busy, too, but I eat lunch in the break room almost every day because it gives me an opportunity to talk one-on-one with the representatives.

I never eat at my desk because I won’t do anything that my staff can’t do. On the first day of hire our representatives are given covered cups for their desks so that their drinks don’t spill, and my management staff and I use the same kind of cup to carry beverages.

As a result, our call center is very clean, we don’t have problems with bugs and rodents, and our customers don’t hear someone talking with something in their mouth. Our representatives feel that they are being fairly treated because their supervisors, managers, and VP live by the same rules.

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Call Centers India Inc.
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