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Gaurav Raghuvanshi

Rita and Katrina lashed the US coast ... and sent more calls to BPO centres in India.

OFFSHORING, on-shoring... Or, is it `best shoring'?

The two recent hurricanes in the US have meant increased workloads on Indian call centres, proving, by example, one of the most talked about benefits of offshoring - business continuity.

"All good service-oriented organisations have elaborate business continuity plans. If there is breakdown in one centre due to any reason, the work seamlessly spills over to other units and the customer does not even come to know," a senior executive at an international banking organisation told Business Line.

Asked if his call centre in India experienced a spurt in calls as Katrina and Rita battered parts of the US, he said that the distribution of calls or e-mails would have happened seamlessly across different centres in the US and other parts of the globe. It was difficult to put a figure on the increase in the workload in the Indian facilities that could be attributed to the hurricanes. But several other BPO companies say that the increase is significant enough to be noticed. In fact, a call centre in Gandhinagar in Gujarat even took spill-over emergency calls from two counties of Texas as hurricane Rita rained havoc there.

"We took about 500 emergency calls from the US. They comprised spill-over calls from Lufkin and Nacoghdoces in Texas. We had about 10 agents dealing with these calls and they were guiding residents to safer places," says Nisarg Brahmbhatt of Effective Teleservices, a BPO company that has two centres in the US and one in Gandhinagar.

Although the emergency service was an additional help provided by the Gandhinagar centre, its regular operations of taking inbound calls witnessed a ten-fold increase in workload.

Effective Teleservices executives had to put in extra hours at work as the number of calls rose from about 500 a day to 5,000, Brahmbhatt says.The company's canteen was overflowing with pizzas, juice packs and chocolates ordered to keep the agents from going hungry.

Motif India Infotech Ltd, an Ahmedabad-based BPO that handles a leading American online travel company, remembers that it even had to arrange beds for some employees at the time of the 9-11 crisis.

Confirming that the two hurricanes did lead to a spurt in work at its BPO centre in Ahmedabad, Motif founder and CEO, Kaushal Mehta, says the number of mails handled rose about 25 per cent.

But in the aftermath of the September 11 World Trade Centre terrorist attacks, Motif employees worked back-to-back shifts to support the passengers of the nearly 4,000 aircraft that had got grounded.

"Tens of thousands of people e-mailed with change requests for flight, hotel and car rental reservations. Our training room resembled a campsite with beds laid out for employees staying extra hours. In that way, people affected by the disaster on Wall Street were helped out by agents sitting in Wall Street Building in Ahmedabad," Mehta saysBut does the increased workload also translate into increased revenues? Both Effective Teleservices and Motif confirm that the revenue increase is commensurate with the extra number of transactions processed in their centres.

After the hurricane warning was issued, the National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom) had offered 1,000 call centre seats to the Department of Homeland Security to handle emergency calls.

But Nasscom did not follow up on the request as it realised that its member BPO companies were already preparing to offer their services to their clients.

While the news that an Indian call centre offered emergency help to US citizens came as a matter of great pride for several Indians, one wonders if the reverse can be true?

Kaushal Mehta of Motif does not think it is a far-fetched idea. "A US call centre may handle calls on behalf of the Indian centre if the two have an alliance or if the domestic company has a facility in the US. But generally, in the case of a company that has multiple centres within India, other locations will take over the work as part of business continuity," Mehta says.

eworld@thehindu.co.in

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