In praise of a call-centre nation

Donald Trump wants to bring jobs back to America and he certainly means call centres. His populist intention goes against the trend of capitalism which profits from low global labour costs and the pronouncements are even against the interests of those who finance the Republican Party which is of the capitalists, by the capitalists and for the capitalists.

Global Capital, including the companies that run the railways in Britain and provide software for computers, find it economical to hire Indians in Indian cities to answer customer queries through call centres.

I am sure there are statistics which reveal the extent to which the call centre industry has boosted the Indian economy. It’s also likely that numbers can be put to the social effect this outsourced industry has had on the changing class demographic of India.

One must admire the men and women who, from Mumbai or Bengaluru, on a long and lonely shift, answer the phone to guide me through the problem I am having on my badly behaved computer.

That being said, I had an unenviable experience in the last week with precisely such a problem. My Internet server kept spontaneously switching itself off a second after I repeatedly turned it on. Since it wouldn’t stay on-screen for more than that second, I couldn’t access the programme’s “help” or find a phone number to call for some. I had to resort to phoning friends more savvy than me.

I dialled the number they gave me and was given several choices of buttons to press. A distinctly American recorded voice told me that it wouldn’t take more than 20 minutes to connect me to an adviser. It did take that long — the announcement of delay proved accurate — and left me hoping that this call was free. The repetitive music was annoying, but I needed the Internet for work and was determined to hang on, despite the possible cost, the waste of time and the mind-numbing choice of Muzak.

Finally, a voice came on and identified himself in a South Indian accent as having some fanciful English name. I can’t recall what it was but it could have been Frank, Donald or Constantine. He asked my name. I told him and he replied with a cheery and familiar, “How can I help you today, Farrukh ”

“Well, Constantine,” I replied and told him what the problem was.

He spent the next 10 minutes guiding me through the steps I should take to uninstall a faulty programme. He kept addressing me by my first name after each instruction. I replied with “Yeah, done that!” He would say “Great Farrukh!” tempting me to say “thanks, Constantine” — but I didn’t.

The 20-minute step-by-step remedy failed. Our call had ended with him instructing me to switch off, switch on and access the programme. I did.

The programme did exactly the same thing that it had done before. I was frustrated but determined and tried calling again, this time with a 25-minute wait and the same annoying music. I eventually got someone who called himself Arian, Adolf or Vladimir or some such. I was tempted to tell him when he asked, that my name was Fauntleroy or Yugashvilli, but thought better of it. We went through a different installation procedure, but that again failed.

I went through this trying game six times. It was on my sixth attempt on the third day that a lady who called herself Daisy or Delilah or something told me that the problem was being caused by some other programme that had spontaneously upgraded itself on my computer. She told me that they had called the other softwarewallahs to complain and ask them to stifle the upgrade that was interfering with my software, but they had accessed a call centre somewhere in India who didn’t know what they were talking about.

However, she said if I didn’t much use that other programme I should ditch its latest version. I did and it did the trick. I was still on the phone to her and asked her why she and her colleagues didn’t use their real names — after all I wouldn’t mind if they were called Bhola or Priya or Ramaswamy. She said that Americans and Europeans who called couldn’t get their heads or tongues around Sanskritic names which the Hindu parents of her generation favoured — all those Arjathashatrus and Girinandinis! Yes, ok!

The call centre culture has given rise to myriad forms of frustration. One would have thought that nations have been enabled to talk to nations, but it would seem that call centres can’t even get sense out of other call centres.

A prominent Labour MP wrote in a newspaper diary this week that he was at a British rail station with his infant daughter who urgently needed the lavatory. The station toilet was padlocked and there was no official about. Instead there was a “Help Machine”, a phone which connected him to a call centre in Mumbai.

He explained his child’s need. The lady who answered, Yasmin or Yakshini, who must have called herself Tracy, asked where he was. He gave her the name of the station in Devon, England. No, she said she was a thousand miles away and couldn’t get him a key to the loo!

Come to think of it, even if the call centre operator were in Glasgow or Detroit, she wouldn’t have been able to send him that key. And what Mr Trump should consider is that not only are outsourced call centres cheaper for the companies that hire them, the boys and girls from Bengaluru with Indian family life disciplines may, in any event, be better equipped to answer info-tech questions than their American contemporaries.