Hi all,

There has been much discussion around the transition of Call Centres/Helpdesks to India. My question is - has anyone been directly involved in transitioning there own helpdesk/call centre from NZ/Australia/UK/US and if so:

1. What worked well?
2. What could you have done better?
3. How did you measure customer perception/satisfaction pre/post transition relating to SLA's and additionally the cultural change?

There has also been much said about the actual cost savings being off-set by the loss of customer's as a result - does anyone have any stats they could share?

And the trend continues....

Your thoughts/experiences/facts would be most helpful!

Thanks

Hi!

Typically if you have the right technology deployment structure and good DR and failover strategy nothing much can go wrong on the overall quality and functioning of the center from technology aspects...

The problems can typically come up in the event of

1. actual cost savings - facts are sometimes deviating from on paper figures.
2. the training has to be directly monitored by your own team
3. the quality and agent's performance has to be monitored closely
4. Attrition is an issue which could cause higher costs in training

Once the above aspects are taken in control, there should not be a problem on overall transition....it would perhaps be a good idea to spend some time in India and see if the manpower quality available can be trained effectively to your requirements.

Regards,

Asit

Andrea:

We are currently completing a transition to India and I am intimately familiar with the process. We are a Canadian company that over the years has been asked to provide tech support, AR, customer service and remote IT work. We found that this was expensive from Canada and decided to open an Indian Centre as our founder is originally from India.

It took us less than a year from Idea to Implementation. Our centre was built from the ground up (not really, we leased office space...but we built the centre.) Since December, a memeber of our Canadian senior management has been present in the Indian centre to ensure quality.

We found that those positions and processes that were the most defined were obvioulsy the easiest to move to India. Those departments who planned extensively had the easiest transition.

It has been a lot of HARD work. We have seen no financial benefits yet and we have not seen any improvements in quality, but we are maintaining quality.

I hope this begins to answer your question. If you have any other questions or want more detail, feel free to contact me at daniel@shorelesssolutions.com

Daniel

The problem with assessing cost savings in going to India is that most press reports focus on wage differentials, not total run costs. From a U.S. perspective, expect 20% savings in India versus 8% from Canada, 12% Caribbean or the Persian Gulf.

Never give a South Asian center a cost-plus contract because it is impossible to gain accurate cost and billing info. There is too much internal cross-subsidization.

Lankan and Pakistani centers are by far the most cost competitive in the world now.

For QA, InternationalStaff.net has moved from using nearshore (Canada) to U.S. suppliers. The higher quality and consistency of onshore QA staff pays for itself. Remote double jacking is much cheaper than paying for a Westerner to be in South Asia, but for mid to upper level programs onsite personnel are usually a requirement.

Western management costs increase substantially when going offshore. One low-end never-travel outbound U.S. client has gone so far as to cut payment rates to Indian centers by 15%, because of the increased management expenses.

Indian centers on their own are not as ready to invest in their own centers (and technology transfer and training costs) as nearshore or onshore ones. In part, this is due to the high level of brokerage fraud in India and the Gulf. It is also related to the poor profitability of IT outsourcing firms in South Asia. Our data on India has shown that only about 20% of the international call center operations there are profitable.

There are also major tax issues looming with Indian outsourcing. See:

http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/35472.html

Compliance is also a major problem for offshore centers, with only a few in India in full compliance with U.S. rules. None in Pakistan, the Gulf, or Sri Lanka.

As a brokerage and program management firm, we shy away from centers with major compliance issues because of the collateral risk it poses to our programs that are in compliance.

When asking about failures of programs in India, InternationalStaff.net has found that reasons differ according to the type of program. At the high end, failures are largely due to Western clients' management issues and lack of planning, not issues with Indian agents.

See this article for more information on outsourcing failures:

http://crmbuyer.com/story/35308.html

Gulf, Lankan, and Pakistani centers are following a different failure pattern at the moment, but this will change as their IT outsourcing industries mature.

Lankans are out to sea right now and need the most hand-holding.

Pakistani centers are more likely to face technical problems than Gulf or Indian ones, especially given the high utilization rate of VoIP, and with way too many backbone hops. VoIP has not been shown to scale well in Pakistan. Some centers there can and will shift to IPLCs at 8 kbps per channel, but I’m not convinced that 8 kbps is the right number and would like to try 10 or 12 and see how that impacts line quality.

Anthony Mitchell, CEO
InternationalStaff.net