Educated young workers lose accents, work cheap

NOVEMBER 09, 2003:On a dirt road leading away from this city, a line of faded blue buses, white SUVs and dusty cars speeds along at dusk, loaded with thousands of India's 20-something technology graduates.

After an hour of rumbling by construction sites and swerving past puddles, the caravan approaches what looks like a giant space complex -- complete with steaming power plant and nighttime floodlights. Four silver towers -- Creator, Explorer, Discover and Innovator -- rise high into the bug-filled night sky.

There are no spaceships, however. The power plant is here to keep floors of computer terminals humming and 10,000 call-center employees constantly chatting with customers around the world.

There are many roads for U.S. companies to enter India, but no route is currently more popular than hiring Indian contractors to do back-office processing tasks and customer-service work -- what's known as ``business-process outsourcing.'' Indian contractors are proving that just about any administrative or service job that can be done over the phone or the Internet can be handled efficiently -- and far more cheaply -- from India.

A night on the floor of 24/7 Customer, which runs a call center with 1,300 workers in the massive complex, shows why this country is attracting so many tech service jobs -- from hawking credit cards and adjusting phone bills to providing complex computer tech support and performing financial analysis.

Night and day

The employees of 24/7 stream through security gates and into the Creator building for a 6:30 p.m. to 3:30 a.m. shift. Three of the workers -- Saumya Jaikumar, 23, Prem Mani, 32, and Sangeetha Gopal, 27 -- prepare to be ``Sonya,'' ``Ian'' and ``Sandra,'' the Western names they're asked to use when talking to Americans on the phone.

A banner on the call-center floor reads: ``Wear your best smile, make your customer smile, too.''

``It's really an exciting place,'' says a bubbling Ravi Venkatesam, vice president of operations for 24/7 Customer, as he darts through the color-coded, quarter-mile-long call center.

Few who pick up a phone in the United States and dial a toll-free number for help would ever know they're calling here, halfway around the world.

``How may I help you?'' asks a 20-year-old telecom graduate from India's prestigious Institute of Information Technology. He furrows his brow, laboring to understand a woman's Southern drawl in Ashland, Va. Her bank debit card isn't working, stranding her at an ATM.

Across a teal-carpeted aisle, Gopal -- now ``Sandra'' -- sits in a flowing lavender sari, scheduling next-day pickup of a package in northern Scotland. ``Cheers,'' says the engineering grad, finishing the call in a crisp English accent.

United States calling

After the huge East Coast blackout in August, ``Sonya'' and ``Ian'' each answered more than 100 calls a night -- nearly twice the norm. They helped frustrated American convenience-store owners in Pennsylvania and pizza-parlor owners in New York determine which transactions were debited and which ones disappeared into the electronic netherworld when the lights went out.

At 1 a.m. local time -- peak workday hours in the United States -- there is a natural crescendo inside 24/7, climaxing with the noise of nearly 1,300 simultaneous phone conversations and waves of techno music blaring from pods of supervisors who listen and chart the progress of employees. The floor at 24/7 is so big and busy that managers communicate by cell phone from one side of the room to the other.

``Now we are really cooking,'' says Venkatesam, checking the stream of employees in and out of 24/7's all-night snack bar, loaded with free Nescafé and sodas.

Name, location withheld

24/7, a private American company with headquarters in Los Gatos, was founded in 2000. Its 2,500 employees -- virtually all in India -- work as contractors for 10 U.S. Fortune 500 companies. Most of those clients do not allow the workers to use their real names, let alone reveal their Indian location. If asked, the refrain over the phone headset is usually, ``You're calling our global customer-service center.''

Some criticize these protocols as masking the location of work once done by U.S. employees, but executives like Venkatesam say it's just good business. ``A familiar name, it makes everyone more comfortable,'' he says.

So, apparently, does the pronunciation.

In study rooms flanking 24/7's call center and in hundreds of classrooms across India, instructors from as far away as the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business and Britain's Oxford University work to ``neutralize'' Indian workers' accents before they ever touch a telephone.

That often means weeks of teaching employees how to flatten out Indian intonations -- to pronounce ``Betty'' like ``Beddy,'' and sound more American or to stress the ``T'' and sound more English.

These ``accent neutralization'' courses incorporate a whole toolbox of geography lessons and introductions to American culture -- even holidays and baseball scores.

In Nina Nair's class at 24/7, employees even act out American fairy tales and perform Shakespeare.

``It's like the difference between `What's your problem?' and `How may I help you?' In India, there's no real distinction,'' Nair says. ``Over the phone, they are not the same. Americans read into the way things are said.''

All of this training is aimed at providing Western companies a seamless response when they send work to the other side of the globe.

24/7 promises to outperform its clients' best internal call center by 10 percent within six months. But with labor costs typically less than one-fifth of U.S. wages, the company usually shatters clients' expectations for savings.

Lower pay

Employees in hundreds of call centers across India make anywhere from $2,800 to $8,000 a year -- far less than the $30,000 to $45,000 that comparable U.S. workers would make.

What's more, with 98 percent of its call-center employees having college degrees, 24/7 can usually solve customers' technical problems faster and more easily than call-center workers in the United States, who often have high school degrees or less.

India's call center, or BPO, industry has added nearly 200,000 workers since March 2002, and BPO employment will reach 350,000 in the country by early next year, according to researchers at Stanford University. And more sophisticated call-center and back-office work is on the way.

U.S. banks, brokerage firms, insurance companies, and mutual funds will send 500,000 jobs offshore -- 8 percent of their workforce -- within the next five years, estimates consulting firm A.T. Kearney. For every job eliminated from the United States and sent to India, financial companies save $25,000 annually, the firm said.

Bangalore alone is planning for an influx of 1 million of those tech-service jobs in the next eight years, say government officials, who worry about keeping up with electricity and other infrastructure demands.

Electricity is no worry at 24/7, with the complex's dedicated power plant.

``We're on, no matter what,'' Venkatesam says. ``What we may lack in experience we make up for in execution.''

With that, he leaves for a 4 a.m. interview with a job candidate he hopes will manage 24/7's new Hyderabad call center -- ready and waiting with 350 new seats.