From straits times.
AUG 28, 2003
BOOMING INDUSTRY
Dial Asia for call centres with an American accent
BANGALORE - In the past four weeks, Ms Sadhana Verma has picked up
tips on American baseball, learnt American history and spent hours
watching Jerry Maguire and TV shows such as Baywatch and
Friends.
And the 23-year-old Indian college graduate gets paid for it.
Ms Verma is part of India's booming US$2.3-billion-a-year
(S$4.1-billion-a-year) back-office services industry, which is
training thousands of graduates straight out of college in speech
and culture to connect with far-flung customers.
Thousands of miles away in Manila, prospective staff of call centre
C-Cubed are grilled on their knowledge of 'Americana', including
geography and their ability to comprehend accents from California
to Texas.
'We have speech and grammar training during which we get to listen
to different accents from different parts of the United States so
we get a feel for their accent,' says Ms Prima Cruz, 22, who has
been with C-Cubed for nearly two years.
'We try to adopt a Californian accent, which is more neutral than a
southern accent.'
As global giants move business functions such as customer support,
accounting, claims processing and human resource management to
cheaper locations including India and the Philippines, companies
are educating and training their workforce in the different ways
and manners of their overseas customers.
Aided by a large pool of English-speaking graduates and engineers,
India and the Philippines are emerging as the hottest destinations
for US firms farming out business to Asia.
'We don't want our employees to live and breathe like an American
when they deal with US clients, but they should be able to
empathise with them,' said Mr R. Elango, human resources chief at
MsourcE, a 3,000-strong Indian back-office services firm.
Youngsters at call centres are routinely taught to assume British
or American names and get weeks of classroom training in foreign
accents and communication skills. Understanding a client's business
is also key: Companies train employees on insurance and tax
regulations for overseas customers.
At stake is a fast-growing business: Around 3.3 million US jobs in
the services sector and US$136 billion in wages are expected to
move to offshore countries such as India, Russia, China and the
Philippines by 2015, according to Forrester Research.
Entry-level graduates in India are paid between 8,000 rupees and
10,000 rupees (S$320 and S$400) a month, about a tenth of what
their US counterparts earn.
In the Philippines, entry-level call centre employees earn about
US$200 to US$275 a month.
In India alone, about 100,000 jobs have sprung up in the past two
years, doubling the industry's total workforce to about
170,000.
About 60,000 people are employed in the call centre industry in the
Philippines and this number is expected to rise to about 300,000 by
2008.
To cash in on the growing demand for specialised training,
companies offering basic communication skills, accent training and
social skills have sprung up across India.
The country's exports from back-office services are expected to
surge 54 per cent this year from US$2.3 billion reported in the
past year ended March 31.
The industry, which has emerged as a boon for the hundreds of
thousands of job-hunting Indian youth, aims to hit the
US$25-billion export mark by 2008 and employ one million
people.
Revenue from Philippine call centres is likely to more than double
to around US$370 million this year from US$173 million in 2002,
according to local industry estimates. -- Reuters
Copyright @ 2003 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reserved.