India learns call center jobs are dull
In the world of dirty jobs in the technical field, call center jobs have to be on the top of the list. You get no love from anyone; usually because you are bugging folks at dinner time, or it is a cell phone, or in general, people are going to basically loose it on you because no one loves anyone at a call center. India is finally facing the idea that call center jobs are not glamour jobs, and is finding them harder to fill than in previous years.
The job is just not seen as the same kind of glamour job that it was in the past. As well, people taking the jobs have to have a high fluency rate in English, which sometimes can be problematic. Then there is the abuse side of the fence. There are very few people that can say they didn’t abuse a telephone call center person, and it does not matter if the call center was in the USA or moved overseas to India or somewhere else.
In addition to having to work at night, call center workers must sometimes cope with abusive and racist remarks from overseas customers upset with jobs being shifted to India. In an infamous example two years ago, a Philadelphia-based radio show host pretending to order hair beads from an Indian call center operator berated her as a “dirty rat eater.” While the abuse was for an on-air program, Indian call center workers say they’ve encountered similar sentiments from real customers. Source: Time
The other interesting part is the pressure on wages, real wages in India are rising as demand for people increases. Most outsourcing companies now do some level of outsourcing of the outsource. Mexico, Brazil, Vietnam and Kampuchea (Cambodia) have been popular destinations for outsource of the outsource job. This does not mean that the problems will get any better. While the internet makes the final destination meaningless, call centers and jobs in India are not being filled.
It would not be surprising to see the model change over time, since outsourcing tends to follow the path to the lowest dollar amount, call centers will have to follow suit, or give more perks. Giving more perks will increase the operating costs of the call center, inflating prices that will get passed back to the people who need call centers. In all as the world goes global, the pressures in other countries for real wages will have at least some kind of positive influence on American jobs. As overseas jobs get more expensive, that call center in New Jersey might just look like a bargain in comparison.
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