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Much has been written about the offshore threat to UK call centres, but what is the true state of play? By Peter Crush
Admiral Insurance loves it, Orange won't do it, but BT, BUPA, National Rail Enquiries, Prudential, Royal Sun Alliance, Lloyds TSB, AXA, Powergen, Abbey and HSBC all do.
Taking call centre work offshore has become one of the biggest media cause célèbres of recentyears. With everything from trade union rumpuses on UK job losses to stories of dissatisfied consumers who feel that even their simplest problems aren't being dealt with properly, the offshore debate has at leastchallenged the media stereotype of UK call centres as sweat shops.
Seldom is the issue talked about without the word 'threat' attached, and just last month new controversy was stirred in from a data protection stance. Unions have written to the Information Commissioner in an attempt to prevent Lloyds TSB from closing its Newcastle call centre and moving work to India by inferring that it won't be able to guarantee the same levels of data security.
But amid all these battle cries it's not easy to get a true picture of the call centre landscape; whether life really is that bad and whether the UK centres that so lamented offshore activity have done anything to improve their offering to clients and raise the stakes.
If some of the latest reports are to be believed, the offshore honeymoon could soon be over. A recent Contact Babel study reported that Indian call centres are 27 per cent less productive than UK ones, with home agents resolving customer queries more quickly. In the business processing outsourcing sector, the attrition rate among Indian workers is also said to be reaching the same heights as the UK (up to 35 per cent).
Whether this is just what UK centre managers want to hear though is a pertinent point. The fact is, while the UK contact centre industry grew last year by more than the number of jobs that went to India (up seven per cent to nearly 850,000 people), the outlook is less rosy. Since October 2003, 15,000 financial services jobs have been outsourced, and 200,000 are predicted to go by 2009 in this sector alone.
Impact on UK businesses
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