Can anybody provide a comprehensive list of all the UK finance institutions that have sent their call centres overseas. I know my own bank Abbey (National) have just announced it. I am seriously considering closing my account in protest after being with them for over 15 years. I will not be directly affected by it but it's the principle that counts.
I think there should be a national organised campaign going to stop this. It worked for ATM charges a couple of years ago when there was a big uproar about it the banks changed their policies. If people started closing their accounts in droves on principle and moved to banks or building societies where they haven't moved UK jobs overseas then perhaps it will make a difference.
NatWest I remember had an advert on TV a few months ago 'poking fun' at other banks who had call centres in Bombay - however I left NatWest 2 years ago in protest of their low current account interest rates in favour of Cahoot.
What is so special about relatively low wage, unskilled call centre jobs that makes them so controversial?
Jobs have moved overseas for many years and generally the only people concerned are those directly affected.
If you drive a foreign car, eat foreign food, wear foreign clothes or shoes or use electricity made with foreign coal you are just as much a part of the problem as anyone who banks with Abbey.
Citibank have one and I have rung it trying to find out info and it just seemed a lot of hard work and I don't think she understood me at all - Bank of scotland have theirs in scotland still - either that or they train people to use scottish accents.
Did you complain? Rather than moan about them moving call centres abroad make a complaint ... the strongest argument (that will make any difference to the bank) for retaining call centres here is that service from call centres abroad is poor.
There is another point to consider. Are these Call Centres abroad bound by the Telephone Preference Scheme that prevents UK call centres canvassing you at home????
Can I assume that you don't buy anything which is produced outside the UK? What exactly is the principle, we should protect jobs in the UK regardless of cost, and even when employment is at an all-time high? And that we have no responsibility to India, despite having looted it for centuries?
Nothing, but along with all the low paid CS jobs, company's much higher paid, front line support and back office jobs, are moving. It won't be long before the company's core development jobs follow IMHO.
But apart from the problems to the economy of moving these jobs, I also have a problem as a consumer. The two Indian call centres that I have so far had the misfortune to be routed to, have been unable to provide me with an answer to a perfectly simple (but obviously non standard) query. Fortunately (for me) these calls were sales calls so I shall be avoiding these particular Indian call centres in future by not being able to give these companies my business. But had this been a service call to someone that I was already a customer of I would have been stuffed - There are many comments around that other people's dealings with these centres have had a similar result, Personally I have better things to do than make 5 calls to do something when 1 should suffice.
There is also the point that some of the controversy has probably stemmed from the arrogant nature of the companies moving the jobs. They have made comments such as "Indians are better workers", implying that they are more productive per hour, which on the basis of my small sample they obviously aren't. What they really mean is that they do more hours for the same money. But I don't see how getting two hours for the price of one save money if you have to pay the guy for twice as many hours to do the same work?
Yes, but IME the standard of service from the Indian ones is an order of magnitude worse. You have to explain things to them that by rights they should not have to have explained, like how to spell L-O-N-D-O-N.
Odd, my experience is an order of magnitude better, what it really says is I think we don't have enough of a sample size to really know, what matters is the person and how well trained and how knackered they are.
A small observation - in my experience, call centres tend to be inbound only. Some companies do have Outbound Telephony channels - BT, Some Banks and B Socs etc. but these are quite separate from the call centres taking inbound calls.
The TPS applies to everyone, not just call centres, but only applies to marketing calls. It applies to companies registered in the UK. Hence, if your home insurer calls to 'clarify' the status of your window locks (ie are they lockable or latch-only?) and the conversation leads onto a quote etc they have breached no ethical standard/legislation.
By the same virtue, your bank, for example, can quite legitimately call you to discuss a servicing issue on your account at any time irrespective of TPS sign in or not. Why - they are not marketing!! If a servicing call turns into a sales discussion...all the better!
Consequently you can further request from companies 'Contact Exclusion' which is your request specifically not to be contacted by them. As an agreement between you and the co. involved this is normally treated with great respect, but it does not exclude at all costs the possibility of your being contacted. Would you want your credit card co. NOT to contact you if they suspected your card was being used fraudulently when you hadn't noticed it had been stolen?!!
To cut a long story short - remote telephony employees won't be calling you - that will be left to local staff (generally), and yes, if it is a UK registered co they will stick to the TPS!
IME the service from Call Centres is almost always rubbish regardless if location. About 10 years ago calling 999 asking for Fire then being asked by the operator what city Heathrow was in ????? (Operator was Scottish by the way, I was in Heathrow at the time)
The accent problem is often brought up as well, why ?, is it that much more difficult to understand an Indian than a heavy Scouse, Geordie or Glaswegian accent ?
I used to work as a tech support before becoming a developer. Of course, English is not my first language, but I just could not understand those accents. They could have been speaking Farsi as far as I was concerned that I wouldn't have been able to tell. I remember having to ask an Irish customer to e-mail me what he was trying to tell me. :-)
But I agree, Indian accents are as hard to understand.
Ah, but isn't it more like "getting *ten* hours for the price of one" - so even if it takes the guy *four* times as many hours to do the same work, it is still less than half the cost ...
At the moment yes, but this brings me to my next point.
As the difference is salary is so huge there is very likely to be some equalisation over the next few years as (a) third world salaries catch up, (b) for the more skill jobs, the amount people in the UK are prepared to do that job for goes down (when their alternative is no job at all). IMHO it won't be many years before a 10 to 1 difference in salary is only 3 to 1, and at that level the overhead costs will make offshoring more expensive. I heard that one large insurer had offshored some jobs and incurred 30M of start-up costs for a 6M pa saving. So they make no saving at all until year 6. It's my guess that they never see a cost saving from such a deal.
India has around a billion people in it, of whom maybe a few thousand are working in call centres, so I don't think the effect on salaries is going to be all that great. As countries develop in general salaries are likely to rise, but only over a period of decades.
(b) for the more skill jobs, the amount people in the UK
Something which seems to have been almost completely missed in press coverage of this is that unemployment in most of the UK is essentially zero. Aside from the cost savings I suspect that part of what is pushing companies to outsource call centres is that expansion in the UK is difficult because there just aren't many people available who want to do such a job.
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