If you’re considering hiring an offshore call center, you’ll want to read a two-party story by Anthony Mitchell that ran on ecommercetimes.com. Here’s the link to Part 1, which includes a link to Part 2 at the end.
This guy captures the nitty-gritty of starting an Indian call center. Why would you be interested if you don’t intend to open a call center? Because of what the story reveals about certain types of service providers you may be considering contracting with for your call center operations.
The article describes Purple Support Services, a 10-person operation that has been opened by Mahesh Iyer. When you go to the Web site for Purple, you’d think this was a healthy operation that might be able to handle any kind of work you could throw at it. (Well, except for the fact that the “Alliances and Clients” link leads to a page that says, “Coming soon…”)
But the fact is that limited resources means the company can’t afford the kind of “predictive dialer” it would like. The Indian ones don’t have the features (such as metrics reporting or listening-in capability) provided by US offerings.
The author describes internal training and rotation “with promotion opportunities,” but the way it reads, I think maybe the company has a problem with employee turnover, and that makes for “promotion opportunities” that wouldn’t otherwise exist in such a small firm.
The rest of the article expands from Purple and discusses barriers to success that other new call center operations face in India (and, presumably, other locations):
- Access to reliable telecom
- Lack of management expertise in signing on new clients
- Lack of management expertise in protecting confidential information
- Lack of experience in call center operations
And so on.
It’s worth a read to get an inside look at call center operations little covered elsewhere.
