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Indian call centers satisfactory: British survey
Monday, 16 August 2004, 19:30 IST
LONDON: Reporters of a British newspaper conducted a survey on the performance of insurance major Norwich Union's call centres in India and found them not only to be satisfactory but also cost-effective.
The snapshot survey was done by reporters of the Eastern Daily Press, and involved calling up numbers of the Norwich Union and its main competitor Churchill, a part of the Royal Bank of Scotland group.
Morwich had sparked controversy when it transferred thousands of Britain's jobs to new call centres in Bangalore and New Delhi. Customers said Indian staff were hard to understand and did not have enough knowledge of the UK motor industry.
In letters to the newspaper, customers had complained of being left hanging on the phone, of impenetrable accents and having trouble with straightforward queries.
For its part, Norwich said the performance of its Indian operations has been as good as its British sites.
For the survey, the newspaper's team of reporters dialled NU Direct to get a car insurance quote, followed by another to either Churchill - which has all its call centres in Britain - or a similar insurance provider.
Some calls were directed to Norwich's call centre staff in India and others to Glasgow or Liverpool.
All the reporters succeeded in getting quotes without much trouble, although the costs sometimes varied wildly - in one case from £555 to £1,068 for the same level of cover.
The consensus was that calls to Norwich's Indian centres could take a long time, with several misunderstandings over language and accents proving hard to decipher at times, but information did come by.
Indian call centre staff seemed eager to please by offering cut-price rates and free products thrown in, and had a parrot-like obsession with the Norwich Direct catchphrase "Quote Me Happy".
The reporters found that young graduates, keen to sell large numbers of policies to new and existing customers, mainly staffed Norwich's Indian call centres.
NU customer service director Simon Machell said the company had not seen a noticeable rise in complaints since the Indian call centres came on line. The staff was working hard to combat difficulties with language, he said.
"We receive around 1,000 complaints a month at our executive complaints department in Norwich, covering a huge range of issues from pricing to difficulties with call centres. The level of complaints tends to vary and the issues being complained about vary as well."
"In our experience it takes a little bit longer to talk to our Indian call centres, but our customers are, on the whole, not finding the language issue is getting in the way.
"As our Indian workers are getting more experienced, they are getting better at handling the calls, although we do not let them on the phones unless they can have an acceptable conversation with the customer. We're very happy with how the Indian centres are performing."
Source: IANS
Source: IANS