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CALL CENTER Training: All is Not Well

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VoicenData Bureau
New Update

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.

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The Flip Side

As you walk into GE’s call center at Gurgaon, you

cannot stop noticing a brand new car wrapped in a gift pack parked outside

the building. Take a few steps inside the facility where you can see a few

bikes lined up just next to workstations. No, these are not for display by

the company for publicity purpose. In fact, these have been displayed as

an incentive for the agents to perform, excel and stay back in the job,

according to company officials. Read the fine print. The company is

reportedly receiving about fifty resignations every day and issuing a

similar number of appointment letters to keep their center up and running.

Retaining these on-the-move agents has become the greatest challenge

that human resource managers have ever faced. New centers that are setup,

usually offer a higher salary for the experienced agents and these young

employees, do not mind switching jobs even for a paltry raise of Rs 500 or

so. Most of them treat this job as an ad-hoc arrangement and time to freak

out, and very few are serious about pursuing career in the field due to

the uncertainties about future prospects and high level of insecurity of

job. Working in odd hours and in shifts has only compounded the problem.

They work when everybody sleeps and vice versa, to suit the client’s

time zone. This unnatural working environment is taking its toll. Many

have quit their job due to this particular reason. Air Infotech, also

located in Gurgaon, sacked about twenty employees last year. According to

Amitpal Singh, one of the agents "Without giving any proper training,

the management decided that we were not fit for the job and we were asked

to leave suddenly". He adds "There was no training team, no

trainers and so we spent entire three months playing games and doing

non-serious activities, unrelated to our profession". Despite

repeated attempts by VOICE&DATA, no one was available for comments.

These two examples could just be the tip of the iceberg and an eye opener

for other players to get their act together.

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

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Gaurav Chadha, project manager, NIITThe

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.

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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?

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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

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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.

The Mindbank: Training

with



Compassion

Most of the IT companies are at a loss to

explain that they do not have their offices designed to let a

well-educated or a qualified physically challenged person work for them.

The Mindbank’s training facility is a rare exception. The facility is

100 percent handicap-accessible. A person in a wheel chair or crutches can

access every part of the office.

Even washrooms have been designed keeping this in account. There are

ramps, elevators, wide spaces between desks and rooms open both ways, with

door holders fixed at a lower height. According to Sidharth Talwar

"There is no reason why one should not allow brilliant and talented

physically challenged individuals to do any kind of a job".

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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

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