Yesterday was a great day for cultural experiences. One of the topics that came up when talking to my friend at DIT was call centres. Bhutan sees the money made in India from outsourcing call centres for developed countries and wants to join the game. Naturally DIT is involved and the big one they’re working on now is financed by the king’s sister. I offered my help for the chance to meet a member of the beloved royal family, but also because I know she’s paying well and I believe that my services can help her staff in working with their customers. I’m not going in directly with that idea, though. The services I offered are more on the design side, having designed, implemented and technically managed 4 call centres in my career.
Sangay asked me if I thought his staff would be able to manage the technology and I assured him they could. In my opinion, the technology is the easiest factor and his team are all quite capable. The big challenge, I told him, would be in finding someone capable of managing the staff. It’s a huge job to train and monitor each call centre agent and keep their morale high while working in a demanding environment.
That lead to a question on what I thought would be important qualities in the actual agents. I gave what I’m sure were standard answers. Technical competence would be ideal, but the lack could be overcome in many cases with well designed flow charts and clean escalation channels. No. The most important issue would be accent. No one in Australia calling a bank or to complain about a faulty product wants to know that they’re talking to someone in India. ‘How can they understand my situation,’ we think.
Sangay thought this over and said, ‘I think they shouldn’t hire people like me that chew lots of doma.’ I looked at the red stained teeth he had from chewing beetlenut and failed to see how that would be an issue on the phone – as long as they didn’t chew it during a call. ‘Doma makes your tongue thick so no one will understand us.’