Mumbai: Junk the fake accent, speak up, speak clearly and get to the point.
That’s what young workers in India's booming outsourcing industry are being told.
Indian BPO employees are known to shy away from being direct with customers or bosses.
This is one trait that the top bosses in the outsourcing business say must change if the industry is to take a leap from merely providing low-cost services to helping clients build stronger businesses.
When the outsourcing boom got underway in the late 1990s, companies tried to ease Western fears of jobs moving offshore by training workers to use American and British accents.
But industry leaders believe resentment in the West over outsourcing jobs to low-wage countries is waning and are now trying/ to get workers to improve projects, not simply complete whatever is assigned.
While handling back office work, Indian workers are being encouraged to suggest options to improve software programs or simplify procedures.
When dealing with overseas callers checking their bank balance, Indian workers are told to take notes and observe customer behavior so they can report trends and patterns to clients.
That means training workers to move past bad imitations of foreign accents and easy references to Thanksgiving or Boxing Day.
Instead, more companies are turning to training programs for India's army of back office workers that aim at injecting an atmosphere of candid, free speech with a focus on neutral accents - while still chipping off some of the rough edges - rather than trying to sound British or American.
“It's not about accent training now. We do neutral accents,” said Joyce Thorne, who directs training at Integreon, an American firm that uses officers in India to prepare balance sheets, presentations and research for international banks, law firms, and pharmaceutical and media companies.
They're teaching “everybody to talk back and to be aggressive - that's not a piece of Indian culture,” she said, adding that Indian workers are polite to a fault.
Instead of telling a client, "there's a problem with this file," Thorne says most Indians would say, "Excuse me, I know you're busy, but do you mind if I bother you?"
New training programs are geared to teach them “it's OK to question the customer,” says Thorne, a New Yorker who moved to Bombay two years ago.
Global companies have increasingly farmed out any task that can be done over a computer network to low-wage countries. India is the undisputed king of the business with 44 percent of the global market according to India's National Association of Software and Service Companies, and an industry that earned revenues of US$17.2 billion in 2004.
But to keep the industry growing in the face of competition from other low-wage countries, such as the Philippines, executives say their businesses need to evolve.
“Today the objective has shifted - the focus is how do we value add, how do we innovate?” said Aashu Calapa, vice president at ICICIoneSource, which provides back office services.
Vrinda Walavalkar, corporate communication head at ICICIoneSource, believes the outsourcing market has matured.
“The basics are being delivered so the focus has shifted to understanding the customer,” she said.
When a customer calls in, ICICIoneSource manager Shahul Karim said employees are taught to ask direct questions to learn about the customer's investment and savings requirements.
“Asking questions helps figure out the difference in what a 20-year-old and a 60-year-old wants from a bank,” said Karim.
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The big outsourcing companies are famously secretive about their training programs. But Sunil Mehta, the vice president of research at NASSCOM, the country's main software trade group, estimated that 40-50 percent of India's 450 major outsourcing companies were moving from a focus on accents to teaching workers to be more direct and ask questions.
“It's an absolutely healthy trend for employees to be involved in decision making,” he said. “This marks an evolution as companies develop innovative solutions to move up the value chain.”
The shift in training is a relatively new trend, and there's no hard evidence yet that it's brought in new clients or increased revenues.
But Thorne said introducing a Western culture of getting people to open up about disagreements with colleagues and clients has helped identify problems, streamline work and develop software programs that slash costs, save time and administrative work for clients.
In one case, Indian employees streamlined programming procedures while working on business presentations for a client's New York and London offices, which were using different operating procedures.
“It required being assertive, going to both offices and saying, 'Hey guys, you're not doing the same thing, you can't have one practice here and another there,”' said Thorne.
But it's easier said than done when politeness is often an end, rather than a means, and anger or frustration is often bottled up.
Thorne was hard at work on getting staff to open up on a recent afternoon at suburban Mumbai hotel.
Some 20 employees jotted down notes as Thorne took them through a “conflict resolution” training module. To illustrate her point about the need to confront problems, Thorne showed them a video montage of clips from Bollywood moves in which Indian actors variously control their anger, bottle it up or simply blow up.
It's then the young men and women loosened up and started getting into the lesson.
Swapnil Gyani, who has worked for three years with Integreon, making Power Point presentations for investment banks or collating stock prices of companies, said many co-workers didn't add value, merely completed projects or compiled raw data in preset formats.
“People would put pieces together because they didn't want to ask too many questions. If they had a different idea, they wouldn't voice it,” said 24-year-old Gyani.
“Now they say, 'Hey, I'm not quite sure this is what you want' and directly suggest something completely different."
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