The Hindu Business Line : It's your call

This book on call centres seeks to guide you in `achieving outstanding customer service across cultures and time zones.' Make your own call on its India views.

CHECK these lines about India: "There is a long waiting list to get phone service." Wrong, you say. "India is, in general, a poor nation." No, you don't agree.

"Much of learning and education in India takes place through rote memorisation. Widely held group beliefs are reinforced in this manner."

There again, you're shaking your head, not nodding, even as I toss another line: "In India, nodding up and down means yes, while nodding side to side can mean no or that you are listening."

If you're still listening, please note that "allowing is a key concept" when interacting with an Indian. What?

"Allow people to finish what they are saying. Allow the conversation to go where someone wants to take it. When on the telephone, learn from the pace and ceremony of the traditional namaste greeting of putting your palms together in front of you while bowing.

Add a measure of sincerity and pause slightly to ensure that the greeting is not rushed."

Ha-ha, you laugh at the good joke, but ask, "What's all this?" Since you've `allowed' me to finish, I can tell you that these are lines picked from a new book of Nicholas Brealey International (www.nicholasbrealey.com) : Erik Granered's Global Call Centers, to guide you in `achieving outstanding customer service across cultures and time zones.'

On the India views, you can take a call, as much as US companies do, about outsourcing to India, but what is a call centre?

It is "a physical facility that exists to receive or make telephone calls," defines the author, and adds that the facility was born when the telephone was invented in the late nineteenth century.

`Obsession with customer service' has been driving innovation in call centres, he explains.

"One of the primary areas of innovation has been in the application of computer technology," such as the use of ACD or Automatic Call Distributor.

A few facts that the book offers are: 4.78 million work in call centres worldwide, and 2.82 million of them are in the US; offshoring is predicted to grow at 30 to 40 per cent a year; and by 2015, 3.3 million jobs and $136 billion in wages will move to countries such as India, China and Russia. Perhaps that'd include the job of writing books on call centres too!

An interesting discussion in the book is on `extension trasference' where "our tools remove us from the immediacy of the event," and `intimacy paradox'.

The author predicts that digital technology may create opportunities for `more intimate interaction', using camera to achieve eye-to-eye conversation.

But, then, there can be newer problems. Such as, how would customers react to the colour of the call centre operator's skin?

"If the reaction is negative, would we entertain using computerised avatars to ensure the privacy of the agent and put a more mainstream face on the company?"

Granered goes one step further: "Perhaps some day we might even meet our customers on a virtual holodeck Star Trek-style. We may greet the customer with a full handshake. Where is that customer from? Better check the customer database. What is the proper greeting? Perhaps it is a bear hug or a kiss on each cheek, or is it three kisses?"

Just something, that is, before I kiss the book goodbye, though not saying good buy.

No use plugging holes in the dike

PITAC is short for the US President's Information Technology Advisory Committee, which is peopled with industry leaders and expert academicians.

Chartered by the Congress under the High-Performance Computing Act of 1991 and the Next Generation Internet Act of 1998, it functions under the care of the National Coordination Office for IT R&D (www.nitrd.gov) .

At the end of February, PITAC presented an important report that's now out as a publication: Cyber Security: A Crisis of Prioritization.

In a letter to George Bush, the Committee defines what the country's IT infrastructure is: "Not only the best-known uses of the public Internet - e-commerce, communication, and Web services" but also the less visible systems and connections such as "power grids, air traffic control systems, financial systems, and military and intelligence systems."

Then comes a bad news para - that although current technical approaches address some of the immediate needs, "they do not provide adequate computer and network security."

A section titled, `trusting systems in a dangerous world' points out how the IT infrastructure "embodies the Internet's original structural attributes of openness, inventiveness, and the assumption of goodwill."

Another section titled with an equation, `ubiquitous interconnectivity = widespread vulnerability', speaks of how a former contractor of an overseas wastewater system was able to take control of hundreds of control systems that manage sewage and drinking water, "using a laptop computer and radio transmitter".

An alarming data is that 17 per cent of the 100 companies surveyed in a 2004 poll by Carnegie Mellon University-Information Week reported being the target of cyber extortion.

"Endless patching is not the answer," declares the Report, decrying the long-term effectiveness of "retrofitting networks, computing systems, and software to `add' security and reliability" because that's like "plugging holes in the dike."

Perimeter defence strategy is not the answer either, says the Committee.

The solution lies in the 10 priority areas for research that PITAC has identified, requiring an annual funding of $90 million.

Wonder if any similar effort is going on in India.

Tailpiece

"What a mistake it was to hire a tax expert for the software team!"

"Why, what happened?"

"When I ask him about tables for the database, he's talking about data `under the table'!"

Books2Byte@TheHindu.co.in

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