Dial an 0800 customer helpline in the UK and your call may be answered not in Bradford or Birmingham, but quite likely in Bangalore or Bombay. Operating call centres on behalf of Western clients has become an important new source of international trade for some less developed countries that have previously been associated with manufacturing cheap clothes and electrical items. In October 2012, over 250 call centre providers from around the world exhibited at the UK Call Centre Expo to try to sell their services. In India alone, the value of handling overseas clients’ telephone calls was estimated by Nasscom, an Indian trade body, to be $7bn in 2011. Having grown from almost nothing, the Indian call-centre sector would have been almost unthinkable only 20 years ago.

Handling customer service requirements emerged as a new international trade sector in the 1990s. Organizations of all kinds found increasing need to enter information into databases — records of customer sales, services performed, details of rolling stock movements, to name but a few. In the early days, most firms regarded this as a back-room function that they could perform most cost-effectively by using their own staff at their own premises. With time, an increasing volume of data to be analysed, the growing popularity of customer telephone support services, the growing sophistication of data analysis systems and the falling costs of data communication, many service companies emerged to take the burden of data processing off client companies. 

At first, most data-processing and call-handling companies operated close to their clients. However, by the late 1980s, this activity began entering international trade, to be processed by companies in foreign countries where costs were lower, working regulations more relaxed and trades unions often non-existent. An important factor accounting for this development in international trade was the rapid pace of technological developments. Processed data and voice calls could now be transmitted very quickly and cheaply using satellites and fibre optic links.....

Case study review questions 

1. Why has data processing and call-centre handling emerged as a major new activity in world trade? 

2. What are the advantages and disadvantages to a Western European-based insurance company of outsourcing its call-centre operation to a supplier in India? 

3. What are the challenges and opportunities for the Indian economy of developing its call-centre industry?