Call destination India
-S Nagarajan

Whether inbound or outbound traffic in India is here to stay

October 24, 2002 -- Is India poised to take on the call center revolution? What does India have that differentiates it from the rest of the world? What goes into the making of a call center successful, the technologies and applications involved?

In order to meet the growing international demand for cost-effective, customer-oriented call centers, many organizations worldwide are outsourcing these services from locations like India. India has strengths that make it a destination of choice:

· A booming IT industry, with IT strengths recognized all over the world.
· A vast work force or educated, English speaking, tech-savvy personnel.
· Cost-effective manpower.
· Technical Support.
· The Government of India has recognized the potential of IT-enabled services and is providing incentives.
· The presence of most international technology vendors and solutions would enable creation of most advanced set-ups in this technology-intensive segment.

Technology plays a key role in enabling organizations to enhance customer value, control and reduce costs, meet customer expectations and handle increasing customer contact workloads.

Call centers utilize telecommunication and computer technologies to automate various high-volume inbound and/or outbound telephone activities and services. The technology models for call center development and deployment vary depending on whether the client wants an outbound or an inbound call center service.

The telecom infrastructure is critical to the success of a call center. This includes acquisition of circuit from the US call center to India to handle calls. The technology solution is purely customer driven based on the program being either inbound or outbound in nature. There are four basic technology solutions:

· Inbound traditional: This solution represents a call center-to-call center solution.

· Inbound-Gateway-Analog/IP Phone Extension: This utilizes the customers' infrastructure to do initial call handling and then route the call to India when required.

· Inbound-Gateway-Digital Phone Extension: This is almost identical to Analog/IP Phone extension except the phone used is digital specific to a switch vendor. The solution utilizes the customers' infrastructure to do initial call handling and then route the call to India when required.

· Inbound-IP Phone Extension: This too is based on the full utilization of the customer infrastructure.

· Outbound: In order to maximize the time of an agent, sophisticated outbound technologies have evolved to include many unique features. With the given technology models, a call center in India can carry out tasks 24 hours, seven days a week without exception. Advances in technology have made it possible to locate several functions, even many critical backend processes anywhere in the world.