Wrong Numbers?

India's call centres comes under increasing pressure as growth accelerates at a scorching pace

On just another evening in September 2002, the pick-up vehicle dropped us at this Mumbai call centre. There was no clue of the night ahead. Hitting the floor we discovered that a deluge of calls were waiting to be served. From handling 8,250 calls per week for this US-based tech client, our team was suddenly expected to handle 80,000 calls in a week.

The company had convinced clients that they could take on more business, but there weren't enough consultants to deliver. The HR department promised us that 250 new recruits would join us on the floor soon. Finally, only 20 of them arrived. Naturally, the pressure to deliver was on experienced people like us.

My memory flashed back to the early days. After scoring high in the training process, an enthusiastic colleague had joined us on the floor. But top marks in training were not enough. Floor realities were different. Training looked like an utopian concept. His superior accent worked against him on the floor, because callers stayed with him to get issues resolved.

As a result, his Average Handling Time increased. If we answered 40 calls per day, he managed only 35. Many of his calls delivered better results, but it didn't matter. Performance was judged on the basis of random call surveys sent by the client to customers "" you never knew which call would influence your ratings. It hurt to learn that a top performer in training was the "worst" performer in our team.

As expectations on call volumes hit the roof, I remembered the lessons we picked up from the earlier days. In this fast-buck industry where each call is worth $ 4, quality is an afterthought.

Robert has been working in one of the country's top call centres for the last two years

Indian call centres like Wipro Spectramind, ICICI One Source, Tracmail, WNS Global Services and I-Daksh have bagged a roster of international clients like Dell, AOL and British Airways on the strengths of low-cost efficiencies and a large English-speaking population.

But those global labels hide many emerging local problems. First-person accounts from call centre executives "" of which the one above is just one example "" suggest that as the Rs 7,100-crore, IT-enabled services industry (of which call centres constitute 25 per cent) zooms ahead with a 70 per cent growth rate, companies will have to watch out for the hairpin bends.

"The low-price model might be the focus of Indian call centres but the real issue is managing productivity," says Sunder Sharma, chief operating officer, Lawkim Upstream Contact Management, a call centre on the outskirts of Mumbai.

Of course, part of the issue is linked to hard numbers. "Managing productivity is linked to your ability to forecast the business," says Arjun Vaznaik, chief operating officer, Tracmail, one of the earliest call centres to be set up in India.

Simply put, it means that call centres will have to be accurate in forecasting issues like staff strength required to meet future business requirements and be prepared when work lands on the table.

Early signals indicate that call centres could be heading towards a human resource crunch. Unlike IT companies, which retain consultants on the bench until projects arrive, call centres recruit on demand.

This is where some of the big cities are running into trouble. At present, for every 50 applicants in Mumbai, only one makes it to the job. Four years ago, out of every 100 aspirants, 20 made it.

It's not that call centres have become more quality-conscious in their hiring policies. It's just that there are fewer good candidates left. Vaznaik feels the issue can be tackled, if call centres set up offices across the country and not just metros "" a pattern that countries like the US have followed.

Productivity and quality are problems because initial investments are high. Vaznaik points out that the cost of setting up each seat could be as high as $ 10,000 to $ 15,000 (approximately Rs 4.6 lakh to Rs 6.9 lakh).

To maximise returns, these seats must be utilised throughout the day (the ideal shift utilisation is when 100 per cent of the seats in a call centre are utilised for three eight-hour shifts).

But a three-shift utilisation is far from reality principally because 80 per cent of the call centre business in India comes from the US. Even companies getting business from clients across the US (that is, from the east coast to the west coast) can utilise only two full eight-hour shifts, because of the time zone.

To parry this, Indian call centres have been looking at other English-speaking markets like the UK and Australia, but the US is still the biggest market accounting for 50 to 60 per cent of global spends.

As a result analysts estimate that the shift utilisation of Indian call centres is 1.5 to two shifts. The few Indian companies that get business from all the three markets "" the US, the UK and Australia "" manage a shift utilisation of 2.7 to 2.8.

One option is for call centres to handle their voice-based services during business hours and use non-business hours to answer queries through e-mail. However the voice-based services account for 60 to 70 per cent of business.

But here too there are issues to be sorted out. Every call received by a centre (in-bound or incoming call) has to be picked up within a given time frame (three or four rings or 15 to 30 seconds) defined in the service level agreements (SLA) with the client.

This is possible as most call centres use technology to meet or exceed the required standards. Customers are put in queue before a call centre executive (called agents or consultants) attends to the call "" the average time that customers are in queue are defined by some call centres as 30 to 60 seconds and differs from client to client.

If there is an unusually high number of callers on hold, then team leaders help agents wind up existing calls. Most calls have to be handled within a stipulated time (average handling time or AHT).

This may be fine for, say, credit card services and so on. For call centres that specialise in technology, it's a big problem. One Mumbai centre, for instance, says its inbound calls average two to four hours whereas the prescribed AHT is 12 minutes. "The longest call I handled ran into five hours," says Samantha, who works there.

In Samantha's case it was her company's loosely defined SLA with its Canada-based software client that takes part of the blame for the unusually long calls. The Mumbai call centre's employees were expected to take up only basic trouble-shooting issues.

Complex issues were to be handled by highly experienced agents in a call centre located in Canada. "They stopped helping us as we had taken up most of their jobs. As a result we ended up solving issues where we had little knowledge," says Samantha.

Employees at Stream Tracmail, a Mumbai call centre handling tech-clients (Tracmail has a 51 per cent stake in it) say that for some of their clients AHT is a practice that is followed only in the breach.

However, industry executives point out that in technical calls it's the quality of the call that matters and not the time taken to manage the result.

But employees complain that they are pushed around by team leaders to take more calls. In Wipro Spectramind, for example, agents say that as incremental business came in, the company asked agents to do After Call Work (ACW) "" the process of recording the proceedings after a call "" during the call itself. As most employees were unable to multi-task, ACW remained incomplete.

Raman Roy, chairman and managing director, Wipro Spectramind vehemently denies this: "We get paid when we complete all the elements of the work. If you don't do after-call work, it never gets recorded in the system as a call and you never get paid for it. Why will I stop doing work for which I'll get paid?"

There are other call centres where agents have exploited the loopholes. Samantha says that her call centre only took inbound AHTs as a quality consideration. So employees would hang up on callers as quickly as possible only to call them back.

According to analysts, the odds still favour Indian companies, simply because the hiring process is far superior in the country.

For example, in Indian call centres an average executive employed in a voice-based service would be a graduate, while in the US he's more likely to be a school drop-out.

"The top 15 companies in India would be superior to the top call centre companies abroad in both productivity and quality," says Pijush Sinha, assistant vice president, Avendus Advisors.

And where Indian agents score high on the AHTs is in outbound calls (like following up for credit card payments) which still forms 60 per cent of the business in voice-based services.

Says Sharma, "Agents handling outbound calls manage to maintain their AHTs as they are following a script."

Even in the case of inbound calls, call trends are forecast by referring to past records. "It's a matter of understanding at what day, hour or month the volumes will come and being able to plan for it," says Roy.

The Mumbai-based WNS relates an instance of how forecasting helps manage high-volume periods. The centre, which handles inbound calls for a UK-based auto insurance client, saw call volumes go up by 50 per cent in the period December to February.

That's because it's winter/festive season in Europe so the number of accidents tend to increase (due drunken driving, swerving on snow and sleet etc). WNS increases its number of agents handling calls by 30 per cent during this time by redeploying agents handling data functions to voice services.

Managing attrition would be a major challenge for companies as employees tend to deliver more on the job as they mature in a process.

In India, the attrition rate is 35 to 40 per cent, which is much lower than the US where it is 90 per cent. But in the context of Indian call centres, 60 per cent of employees who quit do not take up better jobs in other call centres.

"They quit because of stress-induced issues," says Vaznaik. Will companies take a right call on this?

Additional reporting by

Amit Ranjan Rai