From straits times.
AUG 28, 2003
BOOMING INDUSTRY
Dial Asia for call centres with an American accent
BANGALORE - In the past four weeks, Ms Sadhana Verma has picked up tips on American baseball, learnt American history and spent hours watching Jerry Maguire and TV shows such as Baywatch and Friends.
And the 23-year-old Indian college graduate gets paid for it.
Ms Verma is part of India's booming US$2.3-billion-a-year (S$4.1-billion-a-year) back-office services industry, which is training thousands of graduates straight out of college in speech and culture to connect with far-flung customers.
Thousands of miles away in Manila, prospective staff of call centre C-Cubed are grilled on their knowledge of 'Americana', including geography and their ability to comprehend accents from California to Texas.
'We have speech and grammar training during which we get to listen to different accents from different parts of the United States so we get a feel for their accent,' says Ms Prima Cruz, 22, who has been with C-Cubed for nearly two years.
'We try to adopt a Californian accent, which is more neutral than a southern accent.'
As global giants move business functions such as customer support, accounting, claims processing and human resource management to cheaper locations including India and the Philippines, companies are educating and training their workforce in the different ways and manners of their overseas customers.
Aided by a large pool of English-speaking graduates and engineers, India and the Philippines are emerging as the hottest destinations for US firms farming out business to Asia.
'We don't want our employees to live and breathe like an American when they deal with US clients, but they should be able to empathise with them,' said Mr R. Elango, human resources chief at MsourcE, a 3,000-strong Indian back-office services firm.
Youngsters at call centres are routinely taught to assume British or American names and get weeks of classroom training in foreign accents and communication skills. Understanding a client's business is also key: Companies train employees on insurance and tax regulations for overseas customers.
At stake is a fast-growing business: Around 3.3 million US jobs in the services sector and US$136 billion in wages are expected to move to offshore countries such as India, Russia, China and the Philippines by 2015, according to Forrester Research.
Entry-level graduates in India are paid between 8,000 rupees and 10,000 rupees (S$320 and S$400) a month, about a tenth of what their US counterparts earn.
In the Philippines, entry-level call centre employees earn about US$200 to US$275 a month.
In India alone, about 100,000 jobs have sprung up in the past two years, doubling the industry's total workforce to about 170,000.
About 60,000 people are employed in the call centre industry in the Philippines and this number is expected to rise to about 300,000 by 2008.
To cash in on the growing demand for specialised training, companies offering basic communication skills, accent training and social skills have sprung up across India.
The country's exports from back-office services are expected to surge 54 per cent this year from US$2.3 billion reported in the past year ended March 31.
The industry, which has emerged as a boon for the hundreds of thousands of job-hunting Indian youth, aims to hit the US$25-billion export mark by 2008 and employ one million people.
Revenue from Philippine call centres is likely to more than double to around US$370 million this year from US$173 million in 2002, according to local industry estimates. -- Reuters
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