Indian call center lands in Ohio
October 31, 2007
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More foreign companies are finding that hiring Americans offers distinct advantages, reports Fortune's Jia Lynn Yang.
(Fortune Magazine) — It would be easy to imagine Reno, Ohio, as the type of place that would be hit hardest by outsourcing - a small American town losing out to the invisible hand shifting jobs to places like Bangalore and Guangzhou. Instead, outsourcing is bringing the jobs to Reno. Across the street from an Army Reserve center and next to a farm, a customer-service call center hums, its 250 workers answering phones for online travel agency Expedia. The center's owner? Indian conglomerate Tata Group.
The phenomenon has a name: "insourcing," the term experts are starting to use when foreign multinationals open offices on U.S. soil and hire Americans, at a higher price, to do the very jobs they once lured overseas. In this case the center in Reno is targeted toward companies willing to pay a premium - its workers there cost up to 40 percent more than their counterparts in India - to give their U.S. customers a more culturally fluent, less frustrating 1-800 experience. (No more hearing someone read from a script ten time zones away.)
Tata, which is based in Mumbai, established its Reno roots last year when its business services unit, SerWizSol, bought the call-center business of travel-processing firm TRX; the deal also gave it a call center in Milton, Fla. "We want to be able to say to a client, If there's a piece [of call-center operations] you want to keep in America, we can do that for you," says Ricardo Layun, head of U.S. operations for SerWizSol.
The Evolution of Call Centers
October 15, 2007
Call centers evolved around 30 years ago, in the travel and hospitality industry. The concept of call centers are giving way to "contact centers". Often, smaller companies cannot afford the high price of Helpdesk software, let alone the resources to fund a full time support center. Call centers gained wide acceptance, as companies began to learn that service is the key to attracting and maintaining customers. Call center help desk software is now available on a wide variety of platforms and salability.
Typical software functionality [Read more]
