"Call centre industry requires significant economies of scale. Most of the players couldn’t understand what it takes to succeed in this field. Nearly $ 8,000 to 12,000 per seat is needed as investment before the results start coming in. Those who could mix and match the investments with customer relationship management are doing exceedingly well. In fact, besides the investment, they chose the right kind of employees. It is what that matters," says Asheesh as he reels of the names of a few successful call centres.

When asked why are call training centres needed at all when most of the companies train the agents on-the-job, Asheesh says that it is due to the gap between the supply and demand. "Most of the companies want to start off as early as possible and for that trained agents are needed."

"No one can just walk in and get a job at a call centre. One has to have a right kind of aptitude and basic potential. Either a person has it in him or he hasn’t. You’ll be surprised to know that out of 10 persons who come in to get trained as call centre agents only about two are able to clear the three-tier screening test that we subject them to. It’s not just that the call centre training institutes train future call centre agents directly. Senior-level management training is also undertaken and the assessment of working agents is also taken up."

"The job at a call centre is demanding as it requires working constantly at nights thereby upsetting the body clock. Even after taking 20 calls the agent has to appear fresh and bright for the 21st call. Agents need expertise to deal with customers," he says.

While agreeing to the fact that agents suffer a lot of physical stress due to constant seating and changed biological clock, he says that the situation is changing. "It’s not that one works only as an agent in a call centre. After a particular age, when the body is not able to bear the stress, an agent can shift to other fields like quality process excellence, sales, customer relationship management, etc. Lots of companies are giving incentives like housing and are drawing up pro-employee human resource policies to ensure that all growth takes place internally."

"Besides this, call centres are shifting focus from being pure voice-based to being blended and Web-based. Since outsourcing is increasing to countries like Australia and UK, the companies are going in for day shifts too. Even for the USA, we are having day and night shifts. It’s not just that an agent has to work at night only."

"The condition of bullying and pressure to achieve targets are same as in any other industry so why single out call centres alone. In fact, now working in a call centre is like working in an oil exploration industry or a refinery. Growth is now both vertical and lateral and you work in three shifts," he says.

For Asheesh drawing a parallel between a call centre industry and an oil exploration industry comes naturally. Or through experience as you can say. Asheesh, an IIT (Kanpur) & IIM (Kolkata) alumni, worked as an engineer in the field of petroleum exploration with Halliburton, the largest oil field services company in the world, before shifting to McKinsey and then Hero Mindmine.