Call Center Crimes: A Desperate Call For Help

Call Centers: In the News for the Wrong Reasons (Again)

This is some news that you will not get at any BPO watch or BPO hub section of the websites. Because this is the gory truth that will be nelson eyed as we veer towards mid-year growth and mid-term plans.

Jyothi Kumari, an individual working with the Wipro BPO Spectramind, was (allegedly) raped and murdered by a BPO driver and his friend. The very brutality of the crime tells us that some people have decided that come life is something so cheap that can be whiffed out whenever they deem so.The victim was raped, strangulated and then, to add insult to injury, her head was smashed against stones. This isn't something that happened in some rural area in some godforsaken country. It happened in Pune, India, at Wipro, one of the biggest companies in the world.

Call Centers - A General Overview

The recent spate of crimes affiliated to call center employees are rising. Of course, they are too small and trivial for one to sit up and take notice – between the tax cuts documents and the monthly turnover reports – on both sides of the globe and the table, but it's getting bad, worse and worst is just a benchmark that will soon get crossed. For those who are not wired that way to believe the media, here's something from a person who has worked in such a situation – this thing exists, very much, and at all steps of the ladder.

Of course, there are people who have the three wheels wheelbarrow concept, that is, they feel something is wrong only when everything else is right, but then again, call center crimes aren't the only thing marring call centers and development centers down here in Snake Charmer's land.

Other than the basic mismanagement, apart from the general idea in the top management that the employees are just disposable and replaceable profiles, moral and legal crimes are rampant in call centers all over India – Bar None.

My Personal Experience at a Call Center

I, for myself, was once picked up by a call center cum development center in India. I was supposed to work as a content writer for one of the leading mobile resellers in the world. So, the interview process was of course a breeze, and because of various reasons – one being that I was not allowed to actually enter the work area – till the time I signed on the dotted line, I did not know that I was working for a call center.

I was always against call centers. I had seen people who worked for them, getting this 'hey dude' accent and attitude after the two weeks of orientation, which was so unlike them and I was vocal about this to my brother. He had told me, do not criticize a thing unless you have actually worked there. So, here I am. Having a grand twenty days of call center experience and all ready to puke it out.

I should tell you, I was treated like royalty by everyone else on the floor. Only the HR was a pain in the you-know-where, but I didn't worry about it. Writers are ruling the world once everything gets over – so chill all you writers who want to get your boss's name on a Ouija board.

And then, I realized, why I was treated like royalty. Half the dudes did not know or care what a content writer was. They just knew that I was working for the best 'department' of the company. Which meant such ubercool perks like being allowed to go to the washroom when I felt like it, and going to have tea when I felt like it. Yes, these are some of the perks in a call center.

It was only later that I realized that I worked for a wrong place, a very wrong place. Now, our client wanted to talk to via AOL messenger. And she wanted us to have her site open, in an admin account, while she spoke to us. So, I undertood that I would have to have something like 1 gig of RAM on said machine to rev up AOL messenger, rev up the site on Firefox and keep the CMS ready to make any changes which we were discussing at the moment.

I found out that our machines had 128 MB RAM, which was so not possible to work with, and I thought that just informing my team leader would solve the problem. I seriously thought that come Monday, I would have a machine with 1 gig which would have me work. Well, a gig of RAM is worth something like ten to twelve dollars, which is freely available to every other person. As a company, as an IT company, it would be logical for the call center I worked for to keep a backup for any and every computer accessory, and the thing should have been up and running so that I could get more productive to the company. Right?

Wrong.

Our team had to go on a keyboard shut down strike before we could actually get a machine with a 1 gig RAM.

Companies wanting to outsource to India, read this very carefully. These and others are the reasons for attrition, not what your 'guy in India' has been feeding you for all these years.

Anyhow, things were going on good, and we were told that we would be entirely updating the website of the said company, right from scratch (how very interesting for a content writer, just imagine what it'd do to my profile – no, I mean, really, I am not sarcastic here, being a part of a team that was making an entirely new website was actually good for me at that point of my profession).

One fine day, I heard some grumbles and saw some 'i am surprised' look when I told them that I work five days a week. The word got out and another fine day a guy wearing a tie comes to me and tells me: you will have to work five days a week because you work only eight hours. If you work for nine hours a day, even then, we can only pay you more, but cannot give you the five day week.

Though I will be beating my own drum here, I should tell you. I have no problems with working six, seven or if were eight, even eight days a week. My boss will vouch for that. I am not one of the new guys on the bandwagon who think five days a week is not only necessary, it is compulsory. I have nothing against them, they have just started working when it had become a fad. I am oldschool, I don't care how much I work as long as it is productive and makes a difference somewhere.

But, I hate to be lied to. I hate a change in a plan by a guy wearing a tie who wouldn't have the spine or the 'responsibility matrix' to change the geographical location of a water cooler even if it were placed in the middle of the floor. So, this got my goat. But I decided that unless and until I did not get a memo in triplicate, I would continue coming five days a week, and the day that memo would come, I'd quit. And basically, these guys thought that they were giving me such a good offer that I'd just swallow this five day a week and try to be in the good books of the team leader. People, they so did not know the content writing market in India.

A good freelance content writer in India can actually make more money than a content writer having a job. But that's a very argumentative and debatable sentence, so let's keep it at that. I know, and therefore I write.

The Transport Mafia and the Call Center

The last straw, was of course, the travel. Now, I suffer from non-synchronization of eyesight. The good thing about it is that I actually get transported into a adrenaline rushing sci-fi movie where blobs of lights are my enemy and empty dark spaces are good for me when I go out in the night, and also that I get free lifts from my friends who know that I have this eyesight problem and care enough for me that I do not end up as roadkill the next day. The bad part of it is that I have never owned a vehicle in my life and have never learnt driving. So, I cannot ever get a girl from a party and offer her a drop home and then veer from the set journey – you get the point, no?

Even with my case, having a vehicle in Mumbai is not like the next thing after having a gas connection. Not many people have vehicles, either two or four wheelers, and have never felt the need for them. How can we forget the lifeline of Mumbai, that steely steed of comfort and logic, the train system of Mumbai? So, I had to rely on the company transport to dump me in the back and drop me to my place of work and back home.

I think this is where I was wrong. I had accepted the offer only because they were giving me a company transport. It was quite far away from where I live and the previous place where I worked was a hop skip and jump from my residence. But then, I also learnt never to believe something that a guy in a tie, or a woman with shoulderpads under her whatever-she-wears tells me.

Let me be more elaborate on my problem with travel to and fro. I stayed in Mahavir Nagar, Kandivli and this office was located in Deonar, after Chembur. This was something like one hour from my place of residence. I was in the night shift, just before the graveyard shift, which was from 4 in the evening to 1 in the night. Even if we do say Mumbai is the most progressed city in India, it would be difficult and even financially inviable for me to take a cab to my home at that time in the night (there were no trains at that time of the night, back then).

It was then that it dawned on me. The dawning of this was so great on me, that I felt I'd melt in the sheer heat of this dawning. This place had a transport mafia! One fine day, I got down at 1:15, because I felt like being more productive to the company, and when I asked them where was I car pool, I was shooed away, being told that the car pool had already left. When I asked them, arrange another for me, I am an employee, that guy gave me a look which told me – 'welcome to tomorrow.. welcome to tomorrow.. welcome to tomorrow.. oh.. oh!' So, I had to wait for a good hour before the next cab came to drop me home, only because I felt like completing my work at hand and leaving to have a sweeter sleep.

Let me now elaborate on how the transport system in the Call Centers work. There are basically two types of transport systems in call centers.

The first is where there is one, or more than one, travel agent who supplies cars and drivers to call centers. So, it is this travel agent's headache about the drivers, their driving experience and anything related to transport company talent from one piece of land to another. The second is where the company has some over enthusiastic Human Resources Management team who screens each and every driver and outsources the task of transport to a single driver and their cars. I do not see anything wrong with any of the above cases. It is just a question of how much manpower do you have to look after various departments of your company.

This was just running in my mind when I heard about the frequent rash driving incidents of the drivers. I was flummoxed when I heard from my colleagues that this company couldn't do anything against these drivers. They had complained about it to the main guy, and he had done nothing. Of course, my logic asked me why couldn't they just sack the transport agent and get a new one. In a while, helped by the other things happening around me, I decided that it was just because this travel agent charged dirt cheap for his services.

Of course, I did not care whether the person who drove me home came in a Gucci or had an aroma of Armani, as long as he packed me home in one piece.

One fine day, while I was returning home in said office transport, this guy was stopped by the Regional Traffic Office, or an RTO or short. I was shocked to find out that this guy did not have a licence or even the papers to drive a motoscooter, forget the heavy duty utility vehicle that he was driving.

Well, pardon me for being so gutsy, but tell me. You hire a person without taking into consideration their licences, let them rule your company with their transportation rules, and basically believe in them with your company talent (which actually is as disposable and replaceable as a razor blade for you), what will stop them from eyeing your girls, and going to the ultimate extent of actually sexually molesting them?

Oh, and I am not saying that only the companies are at fault. Even this new 'sexually free' culture that is predominant in the call centers is at fault. Would you actually accuse a person who comes from a different background from us, if he thinks that sexually molesting a woman who has slept with around three or four people in that very car for varied reasons is ok?

Remember, I am not saying that the girl who was recently sexually molested has done any of the above, but sex and sexuality is something that is freely available in these call centers. Ask someone who has worked in these places.

There are not many things in life that shock me. I have traveled in an autorickshaw at breakneck speed and realized that the brakes weren't working, and had the cool to let that guy decrease the speed in a sane manner and make me jump out of a running rickshaw. It did not disturb me. This guy told me that his brakes were a problem and I had agreed for him to transport me. But this was just me. How could a big call center lay to risk the lives of thousands of breadwinners over a person who did not have the licence to drive?

Of course, many people will tell me that all this happens and should be tolerated when it is a matter of global progress. But I firmly fail to understand death due to negligence, whether it be a million, billion, trillion or quadrillion of dollars in question.

Death in the Call Center

We were a team, with ten people sitting in the same room, discussing work, boyfriends, girlfriends, future plans, house rents, the latest fashions, everything. No, we were not fallen in love or anything, we were just ten people having different lives trying to earn a living comfortably. It was fourteen days that we knew each other and one fine day this news came up to us.

One of us was dead. Gobbled away due to a driver who had done a Bombay – Pune stretch during the day and was forced due to management or financial reasons to come to work. He slept on the wheel, which caused his car to ram into a truck coming from ahead. There was no chance for the driver or the passengers. Five lives were lost that day, and with that my will to work in that structure.

It is only now that the media is taking things to notice. But I am sure, it will not last long. Everyone with even an iota of brains understands why a story is pulled out the offline and online news. I do not need to risk controversy to come out and tell every professional in India and this world:

"We professionals are not something to be taken lightly. We are the people who need to be taken care of. I do not ask a swimming pool or a Mercedes Benz for every employee ever to set foot into a company. I just ask for a sane, safe and taken care of workplace, where every employee feels like working and comes out trumps in their job."