Monday, December 10, 2001		Article

THE call centre opportunity is right here knocking at the doors of India. The call centre industry the world over is growing at a feverish pace. Global teleservice outsourcing trends paint a rosy picture, providing the much-needed basis for the rosy projections and predictions that have been made about the future of call centre industry in India. Investment worth hundreds of crores has been made in anticipation of the gains that the projected growth of the industry in India would accrue to the discerning investors.

The opportunity is big, so are the challenges. Companies have realised that the key to success is customer satisfaction. Many have understood the underlying importance of customer-centric and customer-oriented approach. Customer demands are many, varied and differentiated, so are the products. This has resulted into a complex situation wherein a customer is all set to switch loyalties should he be given an occasion to be dissatisfied and look for getting better service elsewhere. Customers are many and so are the players.

As the companies are realising that there is no better competitive advantage than customer loyalty, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has become the most important tool. This is where the concept of a Call Centre, the most tangible component of the CRM function, comes in. A call centre is the first line of communication with one's customers. Call Centre is an interface between the end-user and the company and helps in maintaining an intimate relationship with customers, which is so important for the success of an enterprise.

The US, European and Australian companies are on a constant lookout for productive and reliable call centres to provide these critical customer support and marketing services. A company would any day prefer to focus on its core competencies and outsource the call centre services to a third-party call centre, which have developed their core competence around providing call centre services.

For provisioning of customer support through outsourced third-party call centres, the customer queries - e-mail, live chat or telephone - are routed to the call centres where specialised agents or customer support representatives as the executives handling customer queries in a call centre are called, attend to these. The companies provide the call centres with relevant product or service information that they offer, along with the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), to which the agents refer while answering queries. Such call centres are typically paid on per agent hour basis or on the number of queries handled, or a combination of these two. The remuneration in this case is tied with the adherence to the Service Level Agreement. With the increase in the number of call centres vying for such inbound customer-support projects, the rates have fallen dramatically in the last year and a half. This shift has made the situation increasingly competitive for existing as well as proposed call centres.

Another aspect of call centre services that has been gaining ground is the outbound telemarketing campaigns. In these campaigns, the call centre agents call up the prospective customers to sell. Herein, the call centres are paid on a percentage-of-sales-made basis or per agent hour basis or a combination of these two. More often than not, per agent hour payouts in these campaigns are contingent upon the achievement of tough Minimum Production Standard (MPS) - an agent may be required to make X sales per shift. Clearly, in outbound telemarketing campaigns, more a call centre sells more it is paid. What if the call centre is not able to meet the MPS? Firstly, it will earn lesser sales commission since fewer sales have been made. Secondly, it will not qualify for the payment of per agent hour rate since the MPS has not been met. Thirdly, it will run the risk of contract cancellation by the campaign provider, because the each lead in the database costs to the company. An agent who makes no sales but has burnt leads has in fact caused a loss to the company. Companies would run the telemarketing campaign at a particular call centre only if the profits generated via telesales more than offset the costs involved via burning of leads.

Apart from having minimum basic qualifications and product training, the agents need to be trained in selling skills with special emphasis on closing techniques and objection handling for outbound telemarketing campaigns so that they are more confident, sales-oriented and convincing in their sales pitch.

Campaign providers lay a lot of emphasis on accent neutralisation and quality assurance standards on call quality including politeness, language usage and clarity, tone, diction and voice inflection. Most of the call centres in India service overseas clients. An Indian agent though good at English will speak, unless specifically trained, with Indian accent and not British or American accent. An agent sales pitch to a prospective customer has to be clearly understood by him in a way it is intended to. It is more important, therefore, that agents need to have their accents or pronunciation set right before going to the headset.

Being a growing industry, the demand for experienced agents is on the rise because of which poaching and rampant job-hopping has become order of the day in call centre circles. A call centre needs to maintain a pool of such persons, who in time of need, can be recruited and trained at a short notice.

Also, outbound telemarketing campaigns are of short and uncertain duration. An agent trying to hard sell insurance policies today might as well be required to sell satellite entertainment services few months down the line. A call centre could also operate an outbound campaign for a company wherein the company has a variety of products, some of which might experience seasonal spikes. Cross-training of agents is the answer to this situation.

While setting up a call centre in India, one has to encounter challenges such as getting government sanctions and mandatory approvals, International Private Leased Circuit (IPLC) and others. Once the call centre is ready for providing the required services, getting it properly staffed comes next and continues till it exists. With everything in place, one needs to get business, which once got, has to run profitably. Operational challenges that surface at this point are most crucial to the overall success of a call centre.

To sum it all, the trajectory that would lead to the call centre industry becoming a Rs. 20,000 crore industry in 2008, as per Nasscom projections, is certainly anything but cakewalk.