The Curse of the Call Centers

Call centers may be a boon for the youth of India, but it's a nightmare of burgeoning proportions here. Call centre calls are the telephone equivalent of receiving junk mail in the post or in your email - unsolicited, badly timed and persistently annoying.

Any given afternoon (UK Time), at around 4 or so, the phone will ring. When you pick up the handset you can tell immediately it's a 'call centre' call because it takes a couple of seconds for a voice (live or recorded) to come on the line. Experience has taught me to disconnect when I get the blank 'greeting' - I've learnt the hard way.

If you have the misfortune to be on line when the voice comes on, you'll be greeted with a (sometimes) friendly voice that's unmistakably Indian with a terrible British accent. It's often so bad that you really can't understand what they are saying.

The accent apart, the voice starts on the sales spiel immediately. Sometimes they give you offers to cut costs on your telephone bills, gas bills or electricity. At other times, you are told happily that you have been selected to win a mobile phone with free rentals! When you tell them politely that you are not interested, they fire back all sorts of questions and they want to know WHY you are not interested.

It’s all very vexing – especially when you are in the middle of a sentence, a nap or something important at work. It’s annoying because they don’t give up. At one level you feel bad for them because all they are doing is trying to earn a living.

A case in point: sometime ago, Mr R had a problem with excess billing on his credit card statement and we went to the local HSBC branch to sort it out. They directed us to a red phone on the wall which would connect us to the credit card department. You guessed right. The call was routed to Bangalore, Hyderabad or somewhere in Andheri, Mumbai. Anyway, the person on the other end of the line took down the details and said “Hold on while I call your branch”. We were standing in the branch, but that didn’t seem to make any difference. The call lasted about half an hour and at the end of it we were fed up and none the wiser.

Call centre employees are at a disadvantage because there are certain things about life here that you understand only when you have lived here, even for a short time. Otherwise, all you are doing is going through a checklist of questions impervious to the growing frustration and annoyance on the other end.

There are times these days when you long to talk face-to-face to someone HERE. It’s not about talking to Indians or East Europeans or anybody else in the blooming industry. It’s about human contact and seeing that the person in front of you understands the problem and more importantly, does something about it. With a call routed to India (or elsewhere), it’s not somebody’s neck on the line. When you disconnect, they just move on. You’re still stuck where you were.