Service Over Fiber-Optic Miles--to India

Betty Coulter is a typical 21-year-old college grad from Illinois. She wears bell-bottom jeans and is a faithful fan of “Friends” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

Or so says Betty, if asked, while taking calls from Americans.

Her real name would be difficult for those callers to pronounce: Savitha Balasubramanyam. And if they listen closely, her Midwestern accent has a touch of South Asian exotic.

Balasubramanyam is Indian. She is a member of a booming business trend in southern India that is saving Western companies millions of dollars and earning young college graduates here their first real rupees.

When an American calls a toll-free number in the States to report a broken appliance or complain about the wrong sweater ordered from a catalog, the call is often routed through fast fiber-optic cables to a center in India.

A polite, friendly voice on the other end is eager to assist--and sounds just like the boy or girl next door, not 8,000 miles away.

To get into her groove, Balasubramanyam created an American family history: Her parents, Robert and Della Grace, are Irish immigrants who reside in Illinois. Her brother, James, is 15. Betty got her business management degree from the University of Illinois.

“A personal relationship with the customer is very important,” says Balasubramanyam, who works at CustomerAsset, one of half a dozen major call centers in Bangalore, an Indian technology hub. “It doesn’t matter if I’m really Betty or Savitha. What matters is that at the end of the day I’ve helped the customer.”

Nation’s Work Ethic Lures Many Firms

That sort of work ethic is why so many large Western companies-- General Electric, British Airways, American Express and Amazon.com, to name a few--have turned to India for customer service.

The agents here are educated, polite and speak excellent English, which is in wide use in India. Labor can be 70% cheaper, leading to big savings for companies that shift customer service departments from developed countries.

Thousands of Indians right out of college line up for the jobs. They get months of speech training in American or British accents, depending on the client they represent. They bone up on sports terms and slang and a good dose of “Baywatch” and “Friends” to bridge the cultural divide between Bombay and Boston.

While most Americans do not aspire to work in customer service centers, young Indians see the job as the first step in a technology-related career.

“Our clients want to utilize an Indian work force as they recognize the quality and work ethic and eagerness of our employees to improve and move up. Our U.S. clients are coming here for that. They are not coming here for cheap labor,” insists Meena Ganesh, director of CustomerAsset.

Still, Balasubramanyam earns just $213 a month on the overnight shift. She takes dozens of calls from customers of a U.S. company that she can’t identify, since some clients don’t want Americans knowing that their calls get answered in India.

While the sum seems paltry--Indian intellectuals dub the workers here “techno coolies” who slave away in white-collar sweatshops--an average Indian earns only $450 a year.

International call centers based in India will generate $8 billion in revenue by 2008, says NASSCOM, a technology industry trade group in India. Growth is accelerating as globalization and government deregulation expand telecommunications in India and lower its cost.

“The potential is unlimited,” says Prakash Gurbaxani, founder and chief executive of 24/7 Customer.com, a customer service center in Bangalore whose American clients include Web sites AltaVista and Shutterfly.com. Anticipating more business, the company’s supermarket-size call center is filled with dark-screened PCs and dwarfs its 300 employees.

“We have all the ingredients here in India to make this a world-class business. As they say in the U.S.--it is ours to lose,” Gurbaxani says.

When one boards the plane in New Delhi for Bangalore, virtually every passenger is toting a laptop and sporting a T-shirt with a technology company logo. The city is awash with tech billboards and knapsack-laden geeks in a hurry.

Hundreds of thousands of computer programmers, software developers, medical transcribers and Web site designers here have left for overseas companies or work in Bangalore for them, filling a technology vacuum in the United States, Britain and other European countries.

Not everyone is keen on the latest information worker phenomenon. Labor activists and intellectuals deem call centers badly paying sweatshops, where abysmal work conditions and long hours would be illegal in the countries of the companies providing them contracts.

The critics say the “haves” are yet again making money off the “have-nots,” ignoring a yawning digital divide. India’s 1 billion people own only 4.3 million personal computers, 26 million fixed phones and 75 million television sets, says NASSCOM. An estimated 3.2 million use the Internet.

Noted Indian author Arundhati Roy, an outspoken foe of globalization, recently wrote in an article condemning the West that the adoption of American accents for jobs in call centers shows “how easily an ancient civilization can be made to abase itself completely.”

“You have to change your name from Arundhati to Annie and pretend that you’re an American,” she says in an interview, laughing. “It’s a very fascinating phenomenon . . . the other side of religious fundamentalism.”

Easily said by upper-class, well-educated critics, the business’s supporters counter.

“It’s easy to preach on a full stomach,” says Gurbaxani of 24/7 Customer.com. “If I didn’t have to work for a living to support a family, then I can be on my high horse. Most of these kids are just trying to make ends meet.”

Gurbaxani, a graduate of the New Jersey Institute of Technology who lived in the United States for 14 years, returned to India in 1997 with an idea he believed would benefit his compatriots as well as foreign customers.

Employees Seek to Please Callers

Along the lines of Microsoft and Indian software giant Infosys, all his employees get shares in 24/7 Customer.com, thereby having a stake in pleasing customers.

And employees at many call centers, such as 24/7 Customer.com and CustomerAsset, aren’t just using fake accents to appease callers. They’re trained to troubleshoot for clients, respond to e-mails and provide data and marketing analysis.

Ganesh of CustomerAsset expresses surprise at comments such as Roy’s.

“They’re learning a new culture, and a new culture is like a new language,” she says. “If I study French, am I demeaning myself?”

Betty Coulter, meanwhile, just chalks it up to being uncool.

“That’s the attitude of the older generation,” shrugs Balasubramanyam, her hair cut in a short bob. “Speaking in an American accent doesn’t mean you’re Americanized. Why not just imbibe the good?”