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Indian call centres resorting to trickery
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created 4 months ago | Tagged: |
Sassy
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India’s call centres — a key cog in the country’s championed services industry — have been going through hard times as anger has simmered in North America over jobs being outsourced overseas. The issue is a political minefield and in some call centres, including this one in Noida, employees are convinced it’s easier to say they’re calling from Canada.
Perhaps a laid off General Motors worker in Michigan would be less likely to snap at a caller from Calgary rather than one from India, the thinking goes. It’s also easier to coax a U.S. customer to provide credit-card information for a purchase if they think they’re dealing with someone “next door” in Canada.
“Many scams are happening right now and Canada is close to the U.S.,” Mehra says. “With everything going on, people think it’s less risky to send your information to Canada.”
It’s standard practice in so-called “accent neutralization” classes to teach new employees how to sound North American.
But as any Anglophone studying French knows, it’s not easy to disguise an accent and the Indian accent remains a point of contention for some clients.
That’s good news for the Philippines, where locals are said to speak with an American accent, and bad news for India.
The Philippines’ share of the call centre industry has climbed from virtually zero a decade ago to 15 per cent. Meanwhile, India’s share of the market, while growing in value, has fallen to 40 per cent from about 80 per cent in 2004, the Wall Street Journal reported recently.
Singh says some customers have asked him to become “friends” on the social networking website Facebook so he’s set up a fake profile using the name Darius Black, a name he also uses during sales calls.
“You really do have some people out there who just want to talk,” Singh says. “If it helps make the sale we do it.”
