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.

... contd.