Indian call centres get into innovation mode

BANGALORE: If you thought that outsourcing to Indian call centres meant mere back office entries or just technical help desk, think again.
Call centre agents here answer the queries of London train passengers 7,500 km away and also help manage road traffic in London and book cars for clients in the US. In fact, contact centres in India are pirouetting on the innovation edge of outsourcing.
A boy lost in any state in the US or a driver unable to find the direction to his destination, calls up a toll free number in the US.
This is routed to yet another call centre here in India which works on the global information system (GIS) and maps out exactly where the person is. It checks out all the routes possible and shows him the way from 15,000 km away.
Or take the case of a Delhi-based call centre which handles more than loan processing or claims.
It is part of a loan recovery company in the US which buys bad debt (debt written off by banks because the people to whom the loan was given could not be traced or maybe were insolvent) from banks at a fraction of the cost and tries to recover it.
Whatever money is recovered invariably is more than the amount it paid for the bad debt. The call centre here not only makes numerous calls but also hires financial analysts in India who analyse cases and report whether the debt can be recovered or not.
Bangalore-based Eidesign, is into doing e-learning outsourced work for a quality audit firm in Japan. The Japanese company which does quality audit like TUV certification outsources all its e-learning courseware to the team here which hires subject experts as well as training programmers who develop the matter which goes on the web for training all over the world.
Says Asha Pandey who runs the show from here, "We started in a small way a few years ago but now, we are imparting training courses for all the companies'' branches across the globe."
And, then there is Chennai-based Office Tiger which does all the secretarial work for one of the top five consulting firms.
Right from letter drafting to making power point presentations, they are able to even offer consulting advice to their clients.
A Mumbai-based contact centre again encashes on the time zone advantage. For a New York-based stock market firm, this call centre does all the scrip processing for the NYSE and Nasdaq listed companies.
Not only does it offer real time information the clients ask for regarding the company''s performance, the volume of trading done in a specific time frame or the fluctuations in any particular scrip, it also works during the day (when it is night in the US) and provides all the essential requirements after the trading is over.
Interestingly, there are a couple of BPOs that offer medical consulting too. Here trained physicians and radiologists examines graphs and scans and give their opinions to the health centres in the US and UK.
"If the Indian call centres are not able to get into the innovation mode and offer more to the client rather than mere transactional work, there is not going to be much of a value add in the outsourcing space," says a McKinsey &Co partner.