Anone have experience using a call center service in India? I’m interested in understanding what it would cost per-hour for people with good English skills and a pleasent phone manner, but not necessarily any specific technical skills.
Are there any other places besides India with a supply of good English speakers that work inexpensively (Guam, Samoa, …)?
Please don’t flame me over outsourcing jobs. I’m just trying to understand the relative costs of on-shore vs off-shore labor for a new business. Given my druthers I’d do it on-shore.
Since the steel mill got into trouble, half the jobs in town have come from call centres. Including my sister’s.
Advantages: lower wages compared to US, same time zone as eastern US, accent similar to General American, high level of education and skills, high level of familiarity with Anglo US culture, public health care so the employer does not have to pay for expensive health insurance. I’m quoting a report from the National Post magazine from a couple of years ago.
It’s not as inexpensive as places like Guam, but it has its own advantages.
What’s the minimum wage in Canada? Is it by province? Canada would be a good choice for my particular need since I am looking for pleasant and polite people.
$8.00 CAD is about $6.90 USD. The Federal Minimum wage is $5.15 but some states exceed that. California, for example is $6.75. That’s unburdened though and the difference in burdened rate due to health care could be substantial. In addition the Canadian government might have an incentive program on top of that.
The Dominican Republic. People I know who work at call centres earn less than US$2 an hour, yet it’s sought-after employment for young Dominicans who speak good English.
My company uses Ireland (but that’s for highly technical calls). For general calls, we still use India, but that work is now more going to the Philippines. We also use Bratislava, Spain, Poland, and I think Czech Republic (don’t quote me on the last one). We get the most general use out of Bratislava. For some reason or another,
we’re not happy with India. The Philippines isn’t so hot either, but we just spent a good chunk of money over there, so maybe things are turning around. FWIW, from my own personal use, Spain and Ireland are the nicest sounding; India is the quickest, but not as “accurate” (for lack of a better word). Our best bang for the buck is Bratislava. I’ll tell my CPO about Canada. She’s from there.
It puts them above the poverty line (assuming a 40-hr week). Many of these employees are students putting themselves through university and contributing to the parental household expenses. Call centre workers earn over US$300 per month. Not enough for a life of luxury but OK for survival.
The official minimum wage in the DR is less than US$200 a month, while the basic family basket has been calculated at about $250.
If this thread is still going and I get a chance to ask them some questions, I’ll post the information here.
In my experience the Indians, Malays, etc do not have good telephone English. My search-fu is lacking but you might try asking HP. They outsourced their Australian support to India and soon started haemorraging sales to such an extent that they brought it back to Oz.
I don’t know anything about India or Indians, but I am surprised you include Malays in the same statement. Pretty much everyone in Malaysia speaks English, it is still one of the official langauges, and all the public information appears in English. The country was still under British rule as recently as 1956, and many Malaysian children still read English books in school (note for Brit Dopers - one of my Malaysian friends, now a university professor, grew up reading Enid Blyton books. You can imagine he has a pretty skewed weird notion of life in England!). So I would be surprised if Malaysian people were not perfectly good at handling calls in English. I’m not trying to contradict your experience… just expressing my surprise.
I don’t think that directly affects the quality of available speakers of good telephone English. There is a lot of localities that primarily speak English and are quite understandable to most English speakers in person, yet are just fundamentally difficult to understand on the phone. Phonetics of an accent and dialect are not that important, but enunciation is and some accents are just fundamentally difficult to understand on the phone because people will not pronounce crucial syllables unless they are mocking NPR. The question isn’t about ability, the question is about willingness to train call center staff in allocution.
Hell, even in person it can be very difficult. I once took a snowboarding lesson and watched a very amusing attempt to communicate between the instructor, who was a 20-something surfer-type from so-cal, and a middle-aged Scottish (at least I think it was Scottish) couple. The contrast was TV-worthy, and while there was no major confusion, I still would think that a phrase along the lines of “Like, that side, is, like, so, like, ways steep, hmm, the other, is like, cake dude, right” would not be immediately understandable to half of the native English speakers of the world if said on the phone.
I don’t think it’s so much the operators’ English skills as the difficulty of caller and operator understanding each other’s accents. Over the Christmas period I rented a car from Hertz. All phone inquiries at Hertz are handled by a single call centre based in the US - in Oklahoma I’ve subsequently discovered. When I called I simply could not understand what the operators were saying, even though they were speaking English. When I went into the Hertz office to pick up the car I mentioned this to the bloke at the counter and he told me that about three quarters of Hertz’s Australian customers made the same complaint.
I’ve been to Malaysia. I’ve spoken to Malays. That was fine. I’ve also tried to talk to them over the phone. That was not fine. There’s a surprisingly large difference between talking to someone face-to-face and over the telephone. Face-to-face, you have all sorts of other cues off which to work. I could also say the same thing about strong British accents, like Glaswegian, or strong French accents, like Quebecois.
My English stepfather (from Manchester) once told me he had trouble being understood in Quebec and in New Orleans.
I had a hard time wrapping my head around Indian English by phone on one project. We ended up communicating by email. The project was not a complete success for many reasons, but unclear supplier documentation was one of them, and I have often wondered how much of that was dialect differences, and how much was the fact that they seemed to pad stuff out to make it impressive instead of making it lean and clear. (Spoons will know what I’m describing.)
mazinger_z, the Soo is not the only place in Canada with lots of call centres… IIRC, the first place call centres started to take off in was Moncton, New Brunswick, because the local phone company wanted to diversify and really pushed it.
I’ll ask my sister what the name of the call centre she works in is. When I went to visit her, we drove around town and she pointed the call centres out and said which ones were good to work for.
The company I work for just transferred our “Tier One” customer call center to Manila. This is where customers initially send their requests for any number of support issues. This move has resulted in a degradation of customer service, due to lack of training and language problems. The folks in the Phillipines work off of scripts, and don’t have any concept of what is really going on back here in the USA. It’s not really their fault–the beancounters just convinced the bigwigs that it saves enough $$$ to make it worthwhile.