TRAINING: Call Center or School?

A basic skill required for a call-center job is fluency in spoken English.

Agents have to be fluent enough to hold a conversation in real time; after all

they don't have the luxury of time to carefully frame their sentences

correctly and quickly go to Merriam-Webster online to check for pronunciations.

Customer care, the part of the business that is heavily dependent on voice,

is the main revenue earner for the industry. According to Nasscom, of a $21—24

billion Indian BPO market, the revenue from customer care will be around $8—8.5

billion by 2008, with the runner up being HR at a distant revenue earning of

$3.5—4 billion. The current pattern reinforces this. According to a survey

conducted by Business World last year, the revenue of most BPO companies is in

favor of voice over non-voice. The voice to non-voice ratio of Wipro Spectramind

is 85:15, that of HCL BPO is 70:30, and Daksh eServices and ICICI OneSource are

at 70:30.

With so much at stake, the question to ask is: does our 'large,

English-speaking workforce' indeed speak an English that is internationally

acceptable?

Fluency in language is mostly developed at the school level, thanks to a good

English-language curriculum. Sure you can read up Wren and Martin as an adult,

but how many people do you know who do that? Now consider this. According to

Nasscom, there are around 245,000 ITeS-BPO professionals in the country today.

Then there are tens of thousands more who work under the part-time or flexi

models. All these people couldn't possibly have gone to one of the better

schools in India, considering that the average school fee (including school fee,

private tuition fee, and conveyance) is approximately



Rs 4,000 in Mumbai, Rs 3,500 in Delhi, and a comparatively lesser Rs 1,700 in
Bangalore.

Moreover, a survey on schools in India, done by Outlook magazine in 2001,

lists 70 schools as India's 'finest'. This list includes only the 10

finest schools from teh categories of Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Kolkatta,

Chennai, Hyderabad, and residential schools and you can safely add another 100

schools to this list to take the number of the 'top' schools in India to

170. Surely, all-or even many-of our agents do not come from these schools.

In fact, Pramath Sinha, a principal at McKinsey has been quoted as saying,

"Apart from Mumbai, Delhi, and Bangalore the quality of graduates applying

for jobs in the ITeS industry needs to improve. The quality of English is not

very good in small towns."

Raman Roy, an industry veteran, says, "20—30 percent of our country's

resources are charcoal. I have some 3,250 people in training today. I will be

happy to hire another 3,000. But I can't find the people."

That brings us to the second question: Do our agents enter the industry as

Eliza Doolittles and are then rigorously trained to achieve the internationally

acceptable standards in communication? When we posed this question to Roy, his

answer was, "I agree with you 100 percent. We can only put less than five

percent of our people on the floor, without any communications training."

Asheesh Gupta, business head, Hero Mindmine too agrees. But, he is more

cautious, saying, "Most of us speak an English that is acceptable to Indian

standards. Training is required to recalibrate it to international

standards."

Indians' communication skills certainly require polishing. We have too many

dialects (the perennial Punjabi-Malayali battle rages on), we speak too fast

(how many times have you been asked by a foreigner to slow down?), we are, well,

largely xenophobic (we take a while to settle in front of 6 foot 2 inch firangs),

and we don't understand their accents easily. (How many of us will be able to

follow American films if the visuals were taken away? Largely, we are able to do

so by associating the visuals with the voice.)

Enter Professor Higgins, the trainers, who are busy turning lead into gold.

They train staff to fix all the above issues. So, in the communications' arena

there's training for listening and comprehension of foreign accents,

neutralization of mother-tongue influence in accent, reduction of Indianisms,

rate of speech adjustments, and cross-cultural sensitivity.

There is also training for grammar and sentence construction, which is a

longer-term proposition though. Explains Atul Kunwar, managing director, global

outsourcing, eFunds International, "For a scripted process you require

basic English-level comprehension and sentence-construction skills. But when you

move to a free-flowing conversation model the agent needs to speak anything from

high-flowing English to even fifth-grade English, depending on the caller."

Who are these trainers and where do they come from? Till five years ago,

nobody wanted a trainer, few wanted to be trainers, and even the good trainers

had to content with paltry part-time incomes of about Rs 10,000 to Rs 15,000 for

a full-day workshop. Today, trainers are a sought-after lot, at least in the

call centers. Says Gupta of Hero Mindmine, "I have seen companies

masquerading an agent with a one-year experience as a communications trainer in

desperation."

But, better companies have quite different standards. Most of Spectramind's

trainers, for instance, are postgraduates, many having studied at LSR (a

premier, Delhi college known for its English course) or abroad. One of

Spectramind's trainers has taught English language at premier schools in Delhi

and has also trained adults for 12 years before she joined Spectramind.

Trainers also make a lot more money today. Rather, companies are willing to

pay them much more. Call centers typically pay around Rs 25,000 to Rs 35,000 per

month to trainers with experience, with training managers getting even more.

EXL, for example, has a salary band of Rs 20,000 to Rs one lakh per month.

Pure-play training companies (such as NIIT, Aptech, and Hero Mindmine), on the

other hand, have training bands that go beyond Rs one lakh a month also and

trainers are given additional benefits such as profit sharing. Explains Gupta,

"For us, trainers are like line managers and not support function

staff."

Another reason that trainers are on the 'wanted list' today is that a lot

of companies prefer in-house trainers and are developing their own courseware.

eServe, GTL, EXL, and Wipro Spectramind have 10, 11, 14, and 35 internal

communications trainers respectively. Each company also uses the services of

external training vendors. Having been in the industry longer than most other

players, e-Funds has been able to evolve its own training content which is today

certified by various international bodies. HCL Technologies too conducts 95

percent of its programs internally though they occasionally hire third-party

services also.

Agents too need to put in a lot of hard work, what with training being an

ongoing process. According to Sumit Bhattacharya, executive VP, HCL BPO,

"We have a range of programs such as refreshers, remedials, and advanced

skills that cater to the levels of requirements." Even when agents change

jobs, as they very frequently do, they have to undergo training. Says Kunwar,

"Even if a person has worked in a call center before, we put him through

training."

And what happens at the end of all the hard work that both the trainers and

trainees put? If Bhattacharya is to be believed, then 85 to 90 percent of

trainees meet international standards after the training period.

So, what's the bottom line? Yes, the spiel that India offers a large pool

of English-speaking workforce is correct. But, a considerable amount of

polishing and honing is required before this pool reaches international

standards.

On a lighter note, and as a strong nationalist, I can put forth an

alternative theory: maybe the international level of acceptance of

English-language skills is actually lower than the Indian levels of acceptance.

That is why they are willing to accept our Elizas. After all, don't all those

American desis always say, "Our children are smarter than the Americans'.

They get much better grades than the American children in school."

Juhi Bhambal