Running a call centre is one business where a good client relationship is more important than the money. Unless you have good resume and a proven track record, business and calls continue to elude you. It’s a Catch-22 situation, the entrepreneur cannot get clients without experience and vice-versa.

Those who burnt their fingers are the ones who perceived call centres to be a low-tech business where anyone with some money could enter. That is precisely why voice call centres became hot favourites though e-mail or chat-based call centres required less investment, gave faster return on investment and were easy to manage. The other reason was that many traditional big business houses who somehow missed the IT wave, saw it as their ultimate chance to enter the info-tech arena. And this seemed to be a low-tech, high-opportunity area. There are persons who owned a sanitaryware shop till yesterday. Today they are getting their premises converted to set up a call centre.

Amitabh Chandra, CEO, Aragon Outsourcing, feels that the market was let down by those who jumped onto the bandwagon without even having the clue on how to get business and how to service customers. "Many companies invested and are now realising the ground realities. So now to utilise the created infrastructure they have started call centre training and teaching courses," he says. Amitabh feels that those outsourcing the calls are more bothered about who is handling their clients. "India, as an inexpensive country, is of secondary importance to them," he adds.

The underlying hope, that most players in the market rely on, is that one can compete on cost. This is a fallacy. Customer interaction is the last area that companies will look towards for the purpose of cutting down the cost. It is almost impossible to get customer interaction business just by offering low-cost and no extra value.

That many companies want to outsource their call centre business to India only because of the cost consideration is a wrong notion. The reality is that non-availability of enough persons has led US companies to look at alternatives. India seems to be the best suited because of qualified manpower, good English language skills and comfort with technology. Cost is just one of the factors.

"You see, most of the competitors have started playing up the typical Indian business tactics of undercutting. Americans would never come to India just because the business comes cheap here. They want good service and this is what matters," says Atul Gupta, CEO, e3R.

Bad connectivity is putting new ventures on hold. At a recently-held conference on IT-enabled services at Chennai, a director of VSNL claimed that currently there is enough bandwidth on under-sea fibre cable to cater to call centres. However, the stark reality is that practically it is not being tapped.

Pratap Aggarwal, Managing Director, Inde Dutch Systems, agrees. "Technology-related issues, especially the quality of cable we intend using to serve the end customers, need to be redressed. Many of the failing call centres could never upgrade to using optic fibre for voice and paid the cost of constant loss of customer faith in the services from across the planet. Most of the companies are offering built up space to this business that is totally run from the demand side (customer-oriented) rather than the supply side (infrastructure and economic advantage). Lastly, customer contact takes place in real time mode and the business is non-forgiving to mistakes. Many of us have not learnt to deal with the Western mentality and presume the scope of errors in our services," he says.

In fact, to view this problem from a different perspective, it is not a major shakedown. Instead, this industry is being churned. Cream is getting separated from buttermilk. Market leaders, for whom this industry has reaped rich dividends, however, believe that this business still holds a lot of potential. All that the market needs is an entrepreneur who can play the game properly. "Call centres are not failing. If you do not know how to cook, where is the need to open a restaurant? This is a technical industry and sadly, the reality dawns only after three months when a venture capitalist has already invested about Rs 2 crore or so," Raman Roy from Spectramind, a company that built the services business of GE Capital Services India, says. "Where is the problem? We are still doing good business," he adds emphatically.

Clients, for one, look for an established name. Still there are many persons abroad who feel that the Indian market is somewhat pre-mature as far as customer focus is concerned. "Those who want to outsource calls from abroad rely on trusted names. They look at the team, its credibility, focus and attitude. Only then they risk their clients to a company," Gurpreet Singh Bajwa, a technical business planning manager, contends.

A few like Rupinder Ahluwalia from Cincom Systems say that it is an upcoming business with lots of opportunities but entrepreneurs are not able to cash on as they are not following the best practices to run the business. "Every business in transition before being established has its issues. Centres that have stringent quality assurance and control, have got benchmarking viz-a-viz their peers internationally and have their agents trained properly are faring well and would continue to do so," he avers.