We ruin customer experience for Indian call centres.

Recently I went to market to change my home internet service in the pursuit of more speed. After the last 8 years with my previous provider, the speed of 5.5mbs on ADSL 2+ would no longer work. NBN (National Broadband Network) is still 2 years away from my area and I am determined to improve my internet, other than wireless I had a cable option in my street. The changeover experience reminded me of the joy of working with Telco’s and how well they are at under serving and over charging their customers.

This Telco provider has invested heavily in automation systems, presumably to reduce their need for people. This is a common scenario for most Telco’s as they see people as a cost, eroding margin. As a result, I spent more than 6 weeks working with this provider’s off-shored call centre, speaking to a heavily accented English-speaking representative to resolve my issue. We discovered that the root cause was that my service could not be provisioned as the modem shipped to me was not marked as “delivered” in the system and due to the “automated check fault” my order could not progress to the next stage. Also, the concerned representative could not manually provision my order or mark the modem as delivered — a different team was apparently empowered to do it only 24 hours later. Finally, the services were activated, happy days.

I have saved you all the details of the dozens of calls over a 6 weeks period and the frustration of my experience. This is just an ordinary story which most people have experienced and are still experiencing every single day. In fact, according to the TIO (Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman) in 2016 to 2017 there were 158,016 formal complaints from consumers and small businesses. Given how many people who are like me, working full time with family and house hold responsibilities who cannot be bothered engaging the TIO — one can only imagine the millions of deeply dissatisfied customers.

Is the overseas call centre to blame for my experience?

There is a particular view amongst Western “civilized countries” many who over the last few 100’s of years colonialised other countries to their own benefit, and in doing so have brought “civilization” to these countries. In supporting their aims they have divided and conquered these sovereign nations around religious and cultural lines, establishing class-based societies much of which continue to influence these counties long after these western countries have left. I have not seen this more profoundly captured by Shashi Tharoor in his book “An Era of Darkness”, which highlights that India pre-colonialism made up 27% of the worlds manufacturing exports and under British rule fell to under 2%. Shashi captures how the British laws and regulations imposed on the Indians, reinforced their superiority and created an environment where Indian products could not have fairly competed.

Many of these superior views “we are better” continue to influence many aspects of society today and I think much of this is driving the view of outsourced off-shore call centres. “cheaper” lesser abled people a somewhat “acceptable” modern racism.

I managed for the first time to take a trip to India last year and I was blown away by the service orientation of that culture and country which I have not seen anywhere else in the world and I will call out two examples in particular.

I was traveling in the state of Kerala and staying the Port City Cochin. I had just check into a government operated hotel in the old part of Cochin. If you have traveled to India you will know that good Air-conditioning is a vital aid for sleeping, as such, it was the first thing that I checked. The particular A/C unit was noisy to the point that I knew ahead of time that I could not sleep with the A/C unit on or off. I spoke the general manager of the hotel who first troubleshooted the problem could not see an immediate solution, so he offered me an upgraded room. I said to the GM I am not really after an upgrade given I was not going to spend much time in the room, but I would take it if the AC issue could not be resolved. When I checked back into the hotel after a good day of being away I came back to the room and the whole Split System reverse cycle air-conditioning system had been replaced with a new one. In the last 20+ years of traveling domestically and overseas and staying in 100’s of different hotels I have never had such an experience. The GM followed up afterwards to see how happy I was.

Touring around the north of India, I have dined in several restaurants which were domestically orientated. At the end of the meal I was always given a survey card to rate my experience. These short surveys usually had a few questions at the end that you don’t normally get:

1. Have you eaten at any other restaurants in the area?

2. How did you rate them?

3. Was there anything that they did better than us?

Many businesses survey their customers to determine “how they are going” but this inward-looking approach is in stark contrast to seeking for feedback in relation to what others are doing.

No doubt India can be a difficult destination to travel to but with some patience and a curious mind, it can be very rewarding. What blew me away was how service & people focused the nation is compared to my local domestic expectations and experience! This can be quite a paradox to the experience that we receive when we speak to off-shore call centres and where we have such a mind-numbing experience.

In my career I have never worked for a company that did not have a mantra disposed to customers and or staff. This creates lots of people who run around with good intentions measuring CSAT/SSAT (customer or staff satisfaction) and management teams that apply KPI’s “service metrics” towards their call centres making it a call centre problem to solve. These initiatives will always be doomed to failure when the next company initiative or focus comes along.

Lasting people orientation, both customers and staff must be a core value which starts at the top and is seen as a competitive advantage. These leadership teams will see both their customers and people as the reasons for their existence.

My view juxtaposed to what colonialism has left us to believe is that it has nothing to do with the people or country but rather it reflects the leadership, culture, systems and processes of the parent organisations that we deal with. People in call centres are merely just the veneer to what happens within a company. We should know this too if we paid attention as there are just as many domestic call centre services experiences that are equally poor in the local telecommunications companies as there are in the ones off-shore.