Britons take it out on Indian BPO workers

BANGALORE: “You Indian b...., we gave you jobs and you give us bombs!”
That’s how a British caller snapped at a call centre operator in Bangalore a day after the Glasgow airport suicide bomber was identified as Kafeel Ahmed. “I was too shocked for words and he hung up,” she told DNA.

“I never believed even Indians would do something like this,” another Briton shouted at a call centre agent in Coimbatore. “I hung up,” the agent said.

Yet another caller from London hung up after identifying the accent of an operator in Bangalore, but not before shouting out his disgust: “Indian!”

The alleged involvement of three Indians in the failed terror attacks in the UK has given overseas callers, especially the British, a new stick to beat the Indians with.

Ever since the fretting and fuming over outsourcing work to India and the loss of jobs in the West peaked some five years ago, agents of Indian call centres — that handle a variety of tasks, from credit cards to computer troubleshooting — have routinely received offensive calls. But over time, the overseas customers reconciled themselves to their work being done from India and such outpourings diminished.

“In fact, there had been a complete turnaround lately with customers finding that talking to an Indian call centre produced better results than one in their own country,” says Reynolds Praveen of HTMT, a BPO company of the Hindujas.

But the uncovering of the Indians’ link with the terror campaign in London and Glasgow has renewed the racial slur down the phone lines. J Srikanthan, the CEO of Perfect Call Centre Technologies that monitors calls for business improvement, points out that not every caller from the UK turned abusive to Indians after the terror attacks.       

“Perhaps ten out of 100 to 150 calls that an agent handles have been nasty (after the UK attacks),” says Srikanthan who himself overheard three such calls on one day while monitoring.

But that proportion is alarming enough to raise the hackles in an industry that makes and receives lakhs of calls every day. And it is with some trepidation that an operator makes a call to or takes a call from a British customer now.

“The onus of enabling the operators to tackle these calls is on the call centres themselves,” says Srikanthan. “The agents must be trained to tackle such things. Shouting back at the caller or hanging up is no solution. Some explanation (of where we stand in terrorism) might help.”

Call centres had indeed begun training employees in coping with offensive callers angry over loss of jobs. But the employees are now finding that dealing with anger over outsourcing was easier than with accusations on links with terrorists.

BG Mahesh, CEO of Greynium Information Technologies, is “not surprised at all” by the Britons taking out their anger over terror on BPO workers. “The only way to stop this,” he says, “is to let the citizens of UK and Australia know that India is strict in taking action against criminals.”

He is “disappointed” that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asked Karnataka Chief Minister HD Kumaraswamy not to speak about the investigation to the media.