The India-based call center or Indian call center business saw a meteoric rise in the early 2000s when a number of major companies selected India as a potential location for offshore services. India’s contact center and software industries helped it become a top outsourcing destination. In the years that followed, the country continued to expand at an unabatedly high rate, captivating the attention of the rest of the world. But today’s call center business faces several difficulties, from a sharply rising staff turnover rate to fierce competition from new countries in offshore and nearshore locations. Let’s examine the top ten challenges of India-based call centers.
Top Ten Challenges Faced by Indian Call Center Services
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- High Attrition: The Indian call center sector has long suffered from attrition rates that range from 25 to 40 percent. High attrition rates are extremely unwelcome for any team since they create a double blow when an employee quits. First, the gap that results lowers the standard of customer service offered. Furthermore, replacing the vacant positions with new agents and providing further training have major financial consequences. India-based call centers are constantly battling with attrition and costs of new hires with strategies to retain their agents.
2. Negative Effects on Employee Health:
Call centers have a negative reputation for being too demanding when it comes to employee health issues. Constant pressure on agents to work strange hours and perform their best throughout the day to meet escalating customer demands practically leads them to quit. As a consequence, their circadian rhythms are interrupted, making them vulnerable to panic attacks, hypertension, digestive issues, impaired vision, sleeplessness, backache, weakened immunity, and so on.
Finally, these conditions encourage absenteeism, lower employee productivity, and undermine morale. Employee well-being has become an important concern in contact centers in India and worldwide.
3. An industry that has passed its peak growth:
Growth is one of the most serious challenges in the call center sector. India is now a mature player, and although this appears to be favorable, the other side of the coin has a different story to tell. Clients that have previously outsourced call center operations to India have their finger on the pulse; they are aware of the market’s shortcomings. As a result, they are sometimes hesitant to make new investments, which usually leads to delayed growth in the industry. Clients are also looking for new outsourcing locations that are less expensive, more committed to growth, and have superior native English speakers. India-based call centers also have their own unique strengths. They are bundling tools and technologies with their services as a BPM service provider.
4. Expensive Property Costs:
Even in tier 1 cities, commercial property was very inexpensive during the early years of the contact center boom. However, as real estate costs across the country have skyrocketed, establishing and running a contact center business is becoming increasingly difficult while maintaining the cost advantage that was India’s USP in the past.
5. Increased International Competition:
In recent years, nations such as China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Brazil, and Poland have given the Indian call center business a run for the money. In 2014, joint research indicated that competitor nations were stealing over 70% of India’s additional BPO business. Furthermore, the survey found that just one in every ten Indian graduates looked for contact center work. India-based call centers must utilize their own strength and build a trained workforce ready to work in this sector.
6. Accent-induced Communication Gap:
There is no denying that Indian call center agents have a strong command of the English language. However, their accent is not well received by many Westerners. They find it phony and, more significantly, incomprehensible. As a result, a communication gap is unavoidable, and customers quickly become frustrated. Countries with most of their population speaking Western-accented English, such as the Philippines, enjoy an advantage. However, training and accent corrector soundboard technologies in India-based call centers can assist in improving the quality of communication.
7. Maintaining a Good First Call Resolution (FCR) Rate:
FCR is the barometer of customer happiness for call centers. When a caller opens a chat with an agent, they anticipate that their gripe will be addressed immediately. When the caller is forced to interact with multiple agents on the same call, their level of satisfaction plummets. However, today’s tech-savvy customers are indeed more demanding of agents; their issues and inquiries are challenging to answer all at once. Implementing omnichannel experience in India-based call centers is the answer to this challenge.
8. The Outsourcing Butterfly Effect:
Foreign corporate clients are the lifeblood of India’s contact center sector. So, every change in the Western socioeconomic or political environment has repercussions in India. For example, if a foreign country passes legislation prohibiting corporations from outsourcing, Indian businesses will undoubtedly see this as bad news. Needless to say, India will lose business. Furthermore, if other nations provide better government laws for establishing offshore call centers, this will influence Indian call centers.
9. No Differentiating Factors:
A large number of Indian contact centers are only dedicated to assisting English-speaking consumers. They do not prioritize other significant languages, such as French, German, Spanish, and Japanese. By doing so, businesses reduce their development potential with self-imposed constraints while failing to differentiate and expand in other adjacent sectors. This factor has been addressed by personalization and the introduction of new technologies, like chatbots, QA applications, and intelligent automation. Customer support, phone answering services, tech support, etc., are bundled with technologies and applications with the promise of better CX and profitability.
10. Clients Pulling Their Purses
As we end our list of issues with Indian contact centers, let’s talk about one more issue. Most Indian call centers frequently receive insufficient resources. Businesses are driven to overburden employees, reduce wages, and make infrastructure and facility cuts to be profitable and compete in the face of intensifying global competition. As a result, several Indian call center providers provide substandard services.
Conclusion: Choose an India-based Call Center for Your Next Outsourcing Destination.
India may have a few hurdles to overcome in contact centers and the BPO service sector. However, India is still regarded as the preferred location because of its numerous benefits, including easy access to a competent talent pool and skilled resources, the simplicity of establishing operations in tier 2 cities, lower costs, higher sustainability, a better business climate, and many more. Despite all the issues, outsourcing call center operations to India remains quite appealing due to its unique advantages and years of experience in the BPO service sector.