Opinion Why Bangalore BPOs sound a little different now

But that was years ago. These days,the phony drawl and fake twang are simply not enough.

Top-tier back-office firms such as 24/7 Customer say their hiring,training and operations have come a long way from the early days of the outsourcing industry.

24/7 Customer,which has large call centre operations in Bangalore and Hyderabad,besides several overseas locations,says the whole process has evolved into a science.

In order to make its agents perform consistently and predictably,24/7 Customer is drawing mathematical correlations between input (training) and output (performance).

By scientifically analysing and profiling job applicants,the back -office firm says it has arrived at a tried and tested formula for choosing,training and retaining talent that appears to work.

For instance,24/7 Customer has discovered after much statistical probing that agents from the Northeast are well suited to work as customer service agents in the financial services industry for clients like banks and credit card companies.

Again,in Hyderabad where it recruits robustly,the back-office company has found that graduates of 11 specific colleges (out of the hundreds) produce the quality of people that it wants to hire.

In Bangalore,24/7 Customer predicts with a great amount of certainty which type of hires would best suit a particular customer’s programme and which of them would stick with their jobs. They slot the applicants as red,amber and green,with those slotted as red having the least staying power.

They forecast this by mapping the college in which the applicant studies or has graduated from,the educational background (science,liberal arts,etc),which part of Bangalore the applicant lives in,how far the call centre is from the residence,and the applicant’s gender.

Certainly,things have come a long way.

Even as recently as 2005,24/7 Customer’s American and British clients primarily demanded agents with good accents. They did not want callers to their 800 numbers discover that customer service had been offshored to India.

If agents could faithfully mimic the American or British way of speaking,then it was considered ‘fantastic’.

But accent is no longer the sole or even the key parameter invoice-based customer service. The new ways to grade a call centre agent’s efficacy are numerous — building rapport with the caller,being courteous,listening skills,understanding the problem. Accent is just one of the parameters.

Based on customer requirement,each of these gets translated into a score card for the agent who,without his knowledge,is graded Platinum,Gold and Silver. A Platinum agent,for instance,would rarely ask a caller to repeat himself.

Representing a big shift,customers of offshore back-office companies these days are accepting of agents who speak in neutral accents and can be understood by their callers.

Callers too are used to the idea that the person at the other end of the phone may be in India and are accommodating of Indian English. Earlier,many callers launched into full-blown verbal attacks and some even declared they did not want to speak to anybody from India.

Top-tier back-office firms’ hiring processes have matured with time. They now test applicants for speech clarity,attentiveness and problem resolution capabilities before even handing them the offer letters and getting them started on training.

In a well-lit training room at 24/7 Customer’s modern call centre in Bangalore’s Inner Ring Road,two dozen new inductees have shown up for an accent training class.

A trainer with a decidedly American accent is leading the class through the nuances of American pronunciation. The word ‘determine’ is pronounced with an ‘in’ sound at the end,he tells the class,and not a ‘mine’ sound,as some Indians tend to say it.

He asks them to flap the ‘t’ in ‘university’ and ride the theta sound in ‘third’. “No,no”it is not the Hindi “tha” sound,” he tells a new hire.

Accent training,which was once the sum total or at least a big chunk of a call centre worker’s education,has become just another module in the making of an Indian call centre agent.