I was attending a leadership training session yesterday and my trainer brought up something interesting. My previous trainer (who happened to be Indian and who inspired me to write about my Coal or Diamond post) told him that the competition between call centers in India is extremely aggressive. To elaborate, this is what he told him: Picture an eight-story building which has 8 different call centers in each floor. Let’s say, you work in the 8th floor, decide to resign and apply in the 7 other call centers in the building. From the moment you resign in the 8th floor and start applying in each call center from the 7th floor down, you will actually get a job offer before you even reach the ground floor! And as the famous Anglo-Indian comic Russell Peters say it: “You can’t make this stuff up!”

To think that I actually thought that call center recruitment in the Philippines was already aggressive enough, this definitely surpasses my Festival Mall Incident. I was so fascinated that I actually google-d it and saw this article posted in Time not so long ago entitled “India’s Call-Center Jobs Go Begging” that gives us a reason why this is happening:

Young people say it is no longer worthwhile going through sleepless nights serving customers halfway around the world. They have better job opportunities in other fields. The work is tiring and stressful and offers few career advancement opportunities, says Dr. A. Sankara Reddy, head of Sri Venkateswara College in New Delhi. In response to students’ complaints, Reddy said the college a few months ago banned call center recruiters from campus. At least a handful of other local colleges over the last few years have made the same decision.

The fact that call center recruiters are banned in ONE college shocks me already. I wonder if there’s more. As far as I know, to be banned at a certain place, you must’ve done something really grave. Recruitment specialists go to college job fairs to be able to look for potential applicants and it bothers me that there will come a point that the same thing will happen here in the Philippines.

The root cause is mentioned as you read on:

Although the country produces hundreds of thousands of graduates each year, many lack the skills — in some cases, fluency in English — to be employed. The industry is also facing “intense competition” for workers from the retail and airline and hospitality sectors, where wages are now closer to what call centers pay, said Kiran Karnik, president of NASSCOM. As India expands its share of more sophisticated outsourcing like financial analysis and product research and development, Karnik said competition for choice employees is also growing. “As recently as four years back, the choice was pretty clear,” Karnik said. “Either you got a high-paying, good job at a call center or no job at all. Today, not only are there other options, but they are pretty close to the call centers [in terms of salaries].”

Similarly, there are a lot of former call center professionals in the Philippines who have become flight attendants. It is true that the salary range is similar to call centers, not to mention that getting to travel around the world ain’t a bad incentive. Ain’t… bad… at all. But hey, if I’m happy, it would take a lot for me to even think about leaving. So I really believe that it’s all about employee dissatisfaction.

It was also mentioned in the article that “earlier it was considered cool to work in a call center,” Nishanta Thakur, 19, of Sri Venkateswara College said. This is also what Marissa Serrano, a Philippine call center employee, mentioned in a CBS News article back in 2003. What really makes me anxious, because Thakur’s friend, Vishal Lathwal, 19, also said in the article, “If you work at a call center today people will think you don’t have anything else to do or were a bad student.” Now, I’ve heard this being mentioned a few years back by someone I know, but I do hope call center professionals don’t think that their actually bad students. I SERIOUSLY don’t think that this is so. As I said before, you’ll never know who you’ll see working in call centers — from suma cum laudes to college drop-outs, former seminarians to atheists, male and female, and everything in between. They’re all there!

Sadly, the article states that “India faces a potential shortage of 500,000 professional employees in the information technology sector by 2010, according to the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM), a trade group.” Hopefully, this does not transpire. I have high respect for Indian call center professionals. I have been trained by Indian call center experts and numerous people from my company have also been sent to India for training. I would even admit that the level of assertiveness of our collections counterpart in India surpasses the majority of my agents when I hear their call recordings in calibration sessions.

Now coincidentally, while I was writing this entry, Jam Mayer of Call Center Script posted a new entry that mentions some steps in handling attrition. To add to what he said, I highly recommend this: GET THEM ENGAGED. Let them know that you and the company need them by delegating some tasks that you know they CAN do. Show them the importance of the tasks you have given and how it affects the team. It could be as simple as noting down who had system problems and the time they were off the phones. Before I used to think that by doing this, they will think that I’m actually asking them to do more that what they’re paid to do. But based on experience, this promotes a sense of discipline. And if they do a good job, commend them for it! I personally don’t want to stay in a company where I feel unappreciated, so a little pat on the back goes a long way. Employees are a company’s internal customers, therefore, they should be treated AS customers. I’m sure anyone will appreciate that. Won’t you?