Betty Coulter is a typical 21-year-old college grad from Illinois. She wears bell-bottom jeans and is a faithful fan of Friends and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Or so says Betty, if asked, while taking calls from Americans.
Her real name would be difficult for those callers to pronounce: Savitha Balasubramanyam. And if they listen closely, her Midwestern accent has a touch of South Asian exotic.
Balasubramanyam is Indian. She is a member of a booming business trend in southern India that is saving Western companies millions of dollars and earning young college graduates their first real rupees.
When an American calls a toll-free number in the States to report a broken appliance or complain about the wrong sweater ordered from a catalog, the call is often routed through fast fiber-optic cables to a center in India.
A polite, friendly voice on the other end is eager to assist -- and sounds just like the boy or girl next door, not 12,870km away.
To get into her groove, Balasubramanyam created a US family history: Her parents, Robert and Della Grace, are Irish immigrants who reside in Illinois. Her brother, James, is 15. Betty got her business management degree from the University of Illinois.
"A personal relationship with the customer is very important," says Balasubramanyam, who works at CustomerAsset, one of a half-dozen major call centers in Bangalore, an Indian technology hub. "It doesn't matter if I'm really Betty or Savitha. What matters is that at the end of the day I've helped the customer."
That sort of work ethic is why so many large Western companies -- General Electric, British Airways, American Express and Amazon.com, to name a few -- have turned to India for customer service.
The agents are educated, polite and speak excellent English, which is in wide use in India. Labor can be 70 percent cheaper, leading to big savings for companies that shift customer service departments from developed countries.
Thousands of Indians right out of college line up for the jobs. They get months of speech training in US or British accents, depending on the client they represent. They bone up on sports terms and slang and a good dose of Baywatch and Friends to bridge the cultural divide between Bombay and Boston.
While most Americans do not aspire to work in customer service centers, young Indians see the job as the first step in a technology-related career.
"Our clients want to utilize an Indian work force as they recognize the quality and work ethic and eagerness of our employees to improve and move up. Our US.clients are coming here for that. They are not coming here for cheap labor," insists Meena Ganesh, director of CustomerAsset.
Still, Balasubramanyam earns about 10,000 rupees (US$213) a month on the overnight shift. She takes dozens of calls from customers of a US company that she can't identify, since some clients don't want Americans knowing their calls get answered in India.
While the sum seems paltry -- Indian intellectuals dub the workers here "techno coolies" who slave away in white-collar sweatshops -- an average Indian earns only 21,150 rupees (US$450) a year.
International call centers based in India will generate US8 billion in revenue by 2008, says NASSCOM, a technology industry trade group in India. Growth is accelerating as globalization and government deregulation expand telecommunications in India and lower its cost.
RSS