BOMBAY, India – Junk the fake accent, young workers in India's booming outsourcing industry are being told, and instead speak up, speak clearly and get to the point.
Indian workers often shrink from being direct with customers or bosses, a cultural trait leaders of India's booming outsourcing business say must change in order to help clients build stronger businesses by adding value to low-cost services.
When the outsourcing boom got under way in the late 1990s, companies tried to ease Western fears of jobs moving offshore by training workers to use American and British accents when speaking to clients.
But industry leaders say they believe resentment in the West over outsourcing jobs to low-wage countries is waning, so now they're 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 to 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 Halloween.
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 – chipping off some rough edges from strong Indian accents – rather than copying a British or an American accent.
“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 $17.2 billion in 2004.
But to keep the industry growing in the face of growing competition from other low-wage countries, 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.
When a customer calls in, ICICIoneSource manager Shahul Karim said employees are taught to ask direct questions to learn vital information about the customer's investment and savings requirements.
But Sunil Mehta, the vice president of research at NASSCOM, the country's main software trade group, estimated that 40 percent to 50 percent of India's 450 major outsourcing companies are moving from a focus on Western accents in training 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 – a little more than a year old – and there's no hard evidence yet that it's brought in new clients or increased revenues.
And it's easier said than done in a land where being polite 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 Bombay hotel.
Some 20 Indians jotted down notes and nodded attentively as Thorne took them through a “Conflict Resolution” training module.
To illustrate her point about the need to confront problems head on, 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.
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 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.”
