CALL CENTER Training: All is Not Well

The good news is that the call center industry in India is emerging as one of
the largest human resource employer in the country. Reliance reportedly, has
plans to hire 1-lakh agents for its major foray into call center business.
Spectramind is in the process of setting up 1,000 seats center in Okhla. Bharti
Infotrac, also has similar plans. Conseco’s acquisition of Exl services for Rs
250 crore is already creating waves. The demand for trained professionals is
tremendous and so the stakes are high. The nature of these jobs that are being
created entails a different set of training altogether, even rudimentary tools
not being available in India due to the obvious reason that these professions
were new. The bad news is that–most of the training that is being imparted in
the country is nowhere near the global standards. There is a great training
divide between what is needed and what is available or delivered. The success of
call center business in India will depend on the kind of training that will be
available to the companies.

The pioneers in the field sought to fill the training gap by importing
training tools — that included getting trainers from the US to kick off their
operations. These trainers were flown in to do the needful and needless to say,
they did a fairly good job. But as the capacity of these operations kept
increasing astronomically, the companies were unable to handle on-the-job
training.

The Dream Merchants

The
need for trained professionals has led to the emergence of two types of training
markets. One, the easy way out was setting up shops to train people to take up
these jobs. Training institutes saw this as an opportunity to fill up the
training gap. No wonder, training of agents for call centers and
transcriptionists for transcription centers have opened floodgates of
opportunities to the likes of companies highly motivated on becoming NIITs or
Aptechs of these industries. Ironically enough, the training majors NIIT and
Aptech, chose not to jump into the call center bandwagon. The results are
horrifying. This has led to a haphazard mushrooming of training centers offering
these courses, across the length and breadth of the country like the pan (betel)
shops. There are no checks. Fly-by-night operators have woken up suddenly to the
fact that they can make quick money by imparting incomplete training, which is
grossly insufficient to cope with the demanding nature of a job that involves
direct interaction with people who are far away and who speak, think, and behave
in a way unlike an Indian. What they say is training material is nothing, but an
unintelligent aggregation of some material from the great information resource–the
Internet. The material so assorted is grossly inadequate and devised without the
use of any expertise.

Amidst all this chaos, the immediate gainers are those companies who are
genuinely serious about paying attention to the whole process of call center
training and wanting to extend their expertise to offer training solutions to
the companies who wanted to setup such centers. These companies strongly object
to being clubbed with the student-training institutes. They say, they are pure
B2B players who offer training solutions to the call centers. They take up the
training responsibilities right from the recruitment process to training,
retraining and continuing education. The Mindbank, located in Noida, is one such
company that provides a total training solution to the call center companies in
India. Partly funded by Singapore Technologies and headed by a young NRI
Sidharth Talwar, the company has big plans to revolutionize the way training is
imparted at the center. Holistic Enterprises, headed by Ian Stern has been in
the country since 1994, offers similar solutions to the startup call centers,
domestic as well as international.

But then, there are companies who have established themselves and have
created their own training modules, and their training is totally in-house. But
not many companies have resources and expertise to go without seeking the help
of outside agencies.

Regulation Amiss

Considering that call center professionals belong to a technical profession,
the body AICTE, under the aegis of the ministry of human resources development,
is supposed to exercise some checks. But in reality, a ‘free-for-all’
situation scems to exist, which has resulted in an unhindered growth of the not
so good quality training institutes. All that is required in starting a training
institute is to get it registered for a small sum with little verification.
About 90 percent of these institutes do not have the minimal training
infrastructure. The result is that the pass-outs from these institutes are
increasingly getting rejected during the initial screening by call center
recruitment teams. Recently, a call center in Mumbai rejected an entire batch of
students from an institute. Those trained often do not have any advantage over
the freshers who apply for the post of agents due to obvious reasons. But there
has to be a logical way to check these institutes.

Retaining, But How?

There has to be a way out to avoid the unpleasant situation as discussed
above. Retaining an agent for more than a year has become an uphill task. Why is
it so? According to the Communications Workers of America, the union which
represents call centers in the US, employee turnover in call centers is more
influenced by the work environment than salaries. It also says that 80 percent
of call centers are stressful places work, causing employees to perform poorly
and customers to be dissatisfied. According to Dr Rajesh Sood, a medical
transcription training expert and currently the production manager with NY Dox,
"As call center and medical transcription jobs are customary, saturation
level sets in quickly, employees should be given some quasi-management functions
in the form of additional responsibilities, etc, which will let them stay in the
job for a longer period of time".

The HR managers have to seriously work towards developing what is called a
career path to offer additional responsibilities to the call center workers. A
sustained effort has to be made towards promoting the profession as ongoing and
not as a temporary employment opportunity, which is the situation as of now.
Besides the career path, statistics suggest that adequate and high-quality
training also aid in employee retention. The general perception about these
contact centers is that they have been setup with the single purpose of
exploiting the cheap human resource. There is a need to demystify this. The
training wing has to be really strong and should offer ample opportunities for
ongoing training and continuing education. This can help, to a large extent, in
the retention of employees. Needless to say, effort should be made to a decent
salary which would make the profession more attractive. But Smriti Ahuja, vice
president, HR, ExI Services said, "Paying high salary is no guarantee to
retain".

Meticulous Training is the Key to Success

There
is a need to identify the pre-requisites of training process in a proper manner.
The call center professionals are an interface that big companies create to
handle their most important business element — the customer. What is important
for these professionals is to understand the business model of the companies
they are working in and give an informed help that will satisfy the customers
most. They should also have training on soft-skills required to handle a cross
section of global customers. According to Sidharth Talwar, president, The
Mindbank, an end-to-end HR business solution provider, "Call center
training is a very specific, very independent and very individualistic training
where training of one center will be different from training of another
center". He further adds "There are large groups of people who are
hired and trained but cannot deliver. Training cannot do everything, the person
has to be a keen learner". According to Talwar "Nearly, 85 percent of
call center agents in the US are not white. They are immigrants and it is only
because they have been trained properly that they are delivering". The
Mindbank has aligned with Assessment Solution Inc in the US for CRM modules. It
has also tied up with the University of California Davis, which has expertise in
teaching English as a second language. They administer online tests and give
certificates to those who qualify. This training takes into consideration the
various dialect variations that are there in India. Adds Lynda C Lepcha,
training director of Holistic Enterprises, who had the distinction of setting up
City Bank’s call center in India "Trainees have to be conditioned
psychologically to handle the calls and so cognitive skills are very
important". "The diverse accents in India make training a difficult
task at times but standardized modules can take care of this issue", said
Lepcha.

SM Nafay Kumail and Gaurav Chadha, project managers in Knowledge Solutions
Business of NIIT say, "The new economy learning tools, such as Web-based
Training (WBT) and Virtual Classroom (VCR) would be best for training in call
center space". In VCR, the learners are online with the instructor who
controls the environment and gives control to the learner wherever required.
Trainer is heard and seen, and voice and data can travel back and forth. Both
the trainer and learner can use a certain amount of real estate on their PC
screen to show presentations, write and draw sketches and exchange notes. VCR
also has the facility of chat that can go along with the audio interaction that
happens between trainers and students. The novelty of such a training mechanism
is that it can happen in various locations at the same time. Kumail is of the
view that VCR will be more useful in call center type of training, since it will
also have an element of real life situations, as the call center people are
interacting with people in the remote areas.

According to Gaurav Chadha, "These professionals are supposed to
represent the concerned companies and hence, need to be informed of critical
business information and should understand the concerned business model".
He also suggests that online learning communities should be developed where
trainers and students can interact among themselves and guide each other to
handle the challenges in the way.

They can also learn from the good points of each community segment (trainers
or students). Such an arrangement will not be very difficult in today’s
hi-tech environment. There is a need to learn from the mistakes of medical
transcription training, which started on similar lines and is in utter chaos
today.

There is an urgent need for the call center industry in India to organize
itself under a forum. Several splinter call center organizations have cropped up
without any sort of seriousness and agenda. Most of these are efforts to gang-up
to deal with policy-related issues rather than the important issue of
standardizing training process.

CRM foundation and the Call Center Association of India were a good beginning
but they are not totally representative of the industry which is in its nascent
stage. Companies have to come together and develop a standard for CRM in India
if the haphazard growth of substandard training has to be checked. Efforts
should also be made towards some sort of curriculum development wherein the
institutes who want to offer training can conform to the norm. Going a step
further, Indian universities can start a full-time degree course in customer
relationship management, given its potential for the future.

Sudesh Prasad