We are all ears

Tata Indicom will soon replicate its Mumbai call centre, manned by visually challenged individuals, in more cities

If you are a Tata Indicom customer and you receive a call from the company giving you information about its new schemes, there is a possibility that the caller is visually challenged.

Under the project called Drishti, Tata Teleservices Ltd, the promoters of Tata Indicom, has employed 20 visually challenged young men and women at its Mumbai call centre. The call centre works from the premises of the National Association of the Blind (NAB) in Worli area.

The call centre, which started with 10 executives, doubled its staff to 20 within a year and celebrated its first anniversary on the 15th of this month.

Navin Chaddha, chief information officer, Tata Teleservices Ltd, the man behind the idea, recalls the origin of the programme.

"About a year-and-a-half ago, our software development centre in Bangalore developed a software called Interactive Voice Response and to test it we conducted an experiment. When it proved successful, we decided to approach the NAB, who were also pursuing us to employ, some of the visually challenged youth, trained by them and thus the whole thing started."

After the selection process, Reena Chaddha, Navin Chaddha's wife, and a communication professional, taught the selected boys and girls necessary communication skills for the job.

Reena, who works as a project manager for Drishti, says: "I didn't face any difficulty while teaching these visually-challenged youth. Politeness, a quality needed for call centre executives, is an inborn quality among them, I just needed to polish these skills."

Enthused with the success of the experiment in Mumbai, the company has now decided to expand the Drishti project to cities like Ahmedabad and Delhi as well, Navin says.

Tata Teleservices Ltd sends its customer data to the call centre in an Excel file which contains details like names, addresses and phone numbers. These are then converted into voice-based data.

Then using two wireless instruments provided by Tata Teleservices, call centre executives access the data and make calls. A central server keeps track of all the calls made by the executive and the number of calls ending up in a sale.

The software, besides recording updates in specific format, also pinpoints errors and omissions made by the agents. This helps the supervisory staff in making the executive understand his errors and improve upon them.

The set target for each executive is 100 calls per day and he gets paid Rs 3 per established call and earns up to Rs 9,000 per month.

Chaddha says the earning level is around Rs 5,000 in other Indian call centres.

Mangesh Indulkar, one of the star-performers of the call centre, who has now been selected for training by TCS for its business process outsourcing (BPO) operations says: "I think we visually challenged people are better equipped to handle call centre jobs.

We can spot slight changes in the tone of people and change our strategy to deal with the customer. But we need one opportunity to prove ourselves, Tatas have given this to us and I appeal to other companies as well. Give us one chance to prove ourselves."

Deepti Gandhi, another bright call centre executive says: "For me this is a dream job, but for normal individuals it's just another job, so I can say with confidence that we do our job more sincerely and earnestly and perform better. It is for companies to overcome their mental block."

Says Pallavi Kadam, deputy director of NAB's Department of Employment : "We have approached many companies after the success of Tata Teleservice experiment. Many have shown interest in hiring visually challenged persons for their call centres. I am confident that the interest of these companies will soon translate into jobs for these young men and women."

"Apart from call centre opportunities, we are also focusing on medical transcription. Caby, a BPO from the healthcare sector, has employed 10 of our boys and girls," she added.