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Gurgaon News - 2004

UK call centres set to overtake India

LONDON : A second coming is forecast for the UK ’s huge and lucrative call-centre industry, by the first definitive British bible on off-shoring. And the basic mantra: don't fear India, the UK beats it on quality if not cost.

According to the UK government's first-ever report on the industry published on Thursday), British call centres will employ four times as many workers as India by 2007. The sector will remain "healthy" and not sicken and die away because of the Indian plague of "low agent salaries".

Analysts said it may be the first concrete sign that one of the world’s largest, best-developed call-centre markets was actively being encouraged to create an apartheid-like duality in the trade.

The new Department of Trade Industry report says no tears should be shed over the loss of "low value" work – repetitive queries with little flexibility or opportunity on either side".

And it significantly insists the UK concentrate on getting and keeping the "high value work such as cross- or up-selling, or developing customer relationships."

At a high-profile central London industry conference (on Thursday afternoon) to publicise the report, Britain’s trade and industry secretary Patricia Hewitt offered the cheery forecast of one-million British call-centre workers over the next decade.

Analysts said the message was a supremely confident thumbs-up to Indian off-shoring from the mature UK call-centre market.

Hewitt acknowledged the report was a reaction to last year's "panicky" press forecasts of a mass jobs flight from the UK to India

But trade unions remained unconvinced and mutinous, arguing the government had "missed the point and off-shoring is not just call-centres."

Hewitt aide Ayesha Hazarika told TNN, the government wanted to get out a message of confidence rather than the protectionist arguments being put forward in the US .

In a nod to growing British anger over the jobs flight to India , the report significantly urged companies to "consult" widely with trade unions and customers before off-shoring.

And with a sting in its tail, the globalising message also suggested that there could be many hidden and "poorly understood" costs in off-shoring work.

Said Dave Fleming, of Amicus, one of the UK ’s largest and most anti-off-shoring trade unions: "The vast bulk of the 15,000 jobs offshored last year were things like accounting, human resources and IT."

Industry analysts said it overall remained in line with the resolutely off-shoring-friendly Blair government’s position.

Interestingly, the 232-page report challenges the anti-off-shoring trades unions by using the blue-chip organisations of the UK call-centre trade.

The report has been put together by CM Insight, a top-flight UK-based management consultancy; the Call Centre Association the 600-strong private and public member trade body and Contact Babel, the analyst that first identified the British-and-proud-of-it backlash against Indian off-shoring.