The lengths to which companies will go to avoid drawing the right conclusions in favor of the self-serving and expedient never ceases to amaze. A spectacular -- and sad -- example was highlighted in a recent newspaper article ("Indian call staff quit over abuse on the line," May 29, Observer, London), describing how increasing numbers of employees were abandoning their jobs because of abuse, often racist, from British and US customers.
According to the article, irate customers were a major stress factor contributing to rocketing turnover rates at Indian call centers, in some cases touching 60 or 70 percent a year. Some organizations were employing psychiatrists and counselors to help employees to cope. Their conclusion: anger and fear about offshoring were to blame. "When you move jobs away from a country, there's going to be a lot of pent-up frustration which gets let out on Indian workers," one analyst said.
There is zero excuse or tolerance for the kind of abuse documented in the article. But to blame the anger on racism and the effects of offshoring is to ignore the glaring fact that belligerent customers are a major stress factor for UK and US call centers, too. Does that cause a dim light to go on somewhere? It should. The important thing is nothing to do with where the call center is located; the important thing is that customers have had it up to here, everywhere, and the reasons are everywhere the same.
At bottom, companies are still producing to suit themselves rather than the customer. "We don't care about the color of the person we're talking to," says Professor Harry Scarbrough, director of the UK's Economic and Social Research Council's Evolution of Business Knowledge programme. "But we do care about being fobbed off with people working to a script. Call centers don't have the knowledge available in a local bank branch or shop. What customers get is knowledge that is pre-packed, shallow, mass-produced and inflexible.
People don't like that."
It was Albert Einstein who defined madness as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Tragically, but predictably, this is what is happening in India and elsewhere as supposedly advanced companies export toxic western management techniques to countries that can be excused for imagining that there is no alternative to what they are told is "best practice." "Best practice," of course (like "solutions"), is rapidly becoming a warning sign of meaninglessness or complacency ahead. And in the case of contact centers, charges John Seddon of Vanguard Consulting, conventional "best practice" is a large part of the problem, embedding in the work the very things that earned centers their sweatshop reputation and harming competitiveness rather than improving it.
The problem starts with the distance of the call center from the rest of the organization, metaphorically as well as literally. It ought to be the company's window on the world, a vital and sensitive two-way connection with customers; instead, all too often it is a bolt-on cost centre, a lowest-cost sponge for mopping up the mess of the initial product inadequacy. As such, it has no influence on, and therefore precious little chance of changing, the conditions that caused the customer aggro in the first place.
So most call centers start off with high stress factors -- angry customers and lack of influence over the problems they deal with every day -- built into their workload. This is the company's fault, not the customer's.
"The distance is induced by the organization, not geography," says Scarbrough. Offshoring the call center is a perfect symbolic statement of the peripheral importance of customer concerns versus production efficiencies. The factors are compounded many times over by the way call centers are internally designed and managed.
The "sweatshop" analogy is well-founded. Vanguard notes that the measurements on which staff are judged are equivalents of the time-and-motion measures used in factories pilloried by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. Time to answer the phone, time spent on calls, numbers of calls per hour are derived from the need to meet production targets set by management rather than from the purpose of serving the customer.
The result is a double alienation, of both employees and customers. "It's very routinized, high-surveillance work," says Scarbrough of the Economic and Social Research Council. "There's low motivation in skill and small rewards, backed up with the big stick: surveillance and controls applied through technology."
Under the new-fangled (often excessive) technological facade, what's happening is actually a long-hallowed configuration. Aided by technology, companies are going offshore to play the low-cost production option. But in services they still haven't twigged that it is quality rather than quantity or price that's important; and quality, just as it does in manufacturing, requires reversing the whole cycle of production, starting from the customer, not the output target.
Meanwhile, the remedies proposed for the Indian call centers will, like most "best practice," make matters worse. Call-centre workers don't need psychological counselling or anger-management courses; they need a better system and, failing that, a tough trade union.
As for letting staff hang up on abusive customers, as some firms are doing -- one entirely sympathizes, but it's so far from approaching the underlying issues that it's hard to know where to start.
As the costs of the customer revolt begin to mount, companies will eventually have to rethink their low-cost production logic. But sadly it is too late to stop the export of their 19th-century management principles, which cause vast amounts of alienation, exploitation and needless misery to emerging countries -- truly worst practice.
As Scarbrough says, given the low-skill, low-value of the jobs created in India on one side and the destructive hidden costs for customers and companies on the other, offshored call centers may be a remarkable example of an international exchange, freely entered into, that benefits neither party: "That's quite rare."
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
In the intricate ballet of geopolitics, names signify more than mere identification: They embody history, culture and sovereignty. The recent decision by China to refer to Arunachal Pradesh as “Tsang Nan” or South Tibet, and to rename Tibet as “Xizang,” is a strategic move that extends beyond cartography into the realm of diplomatic signaling. This op-ed explores the implications of these actions and India’s potential response. Names are potent symbols in international relations, encapsulating the essence of a nation’s stance on territorial disputes. China’s choice to rename regions within Indian territory is not merely a linguistic exercise, but a symbolic assertion
More than seven months into the armed conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide following a case brought by South Africa regarding Israel’s breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The international community, including Amnesty International, called for an immediate ceasefire by all parties to prevent further loss of civilian lives and to ensure access to life-saving aid. Several protests have been organized around the world, including at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and many other universities in the US.
Every day since Oct. 7 last year, the world has watched an unprecedented wave of violence rain down on Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories — more than 200 days of constant suffering and death in Gaza with just a seven-day pause. Many of us in the American expatriate community in Taiwan have been watching this tragedy unfold in horror. We know we are implicated with every US-made “dumb” bomb dropped on a civilian target and by the diplomatic cover our government gives to the Israeli government, which has only gotten more extreme with such impunity. Meantime, multicultural coalitions of US