By Prarthana Mitra
India’s business processing outsourcing (BPO) industry could soon face a challenge if a bill introduced in the US Congress, which seeks to make it mandatory for all call centre employees to disclose their location, is passed.
If passed, the bill, introduced by Senator Sherrod Brown from Ohio, will also grant customers the right to ask for call transfers from offshore agents to a service agent based in the US mainland.
The bill would also affirm an ancillary proposal to create a public database of all those firms that outsource call centre jobs, which might pit them against those that don’t and deprive them of federal grants and contracts.
For now, the bill has been tabled, pending Congress approval.
Americans lose around $1.5 billion to tech support scams every year, 86% of which originate in India. “For far too long, US trade and tax policy have encouraged a corporate business model that shuts down operations in Ohio, cashes in on a tax credit at the expense of working Americans, and ships production to Reynosa, Mexico or Wuhan and China,” Brown said while introducing the bill.
Brown said that jobs at call centres in Ohio have been hit the hardest, with many companies closing down such support centres located in the state and moving them across the country or to India or China.
The senator added that the US needs to value the contributions of workers at home, instead of ending their careers and shipping their jobs overseas. Newspaper reports have quoted Brown as saying that the US lost 200,000 call centre jobs between 2006 and 2014.
India’s vantage point: Value proposition and cost advantage
K.S. Viswanathan, vice president of industry initiatives at NASSCOM, told Business Standard that the call industry in India had transformed and shifted to digital platforms such as email, chat and social media.
“Unlike Philippines, our dependence of purely voice-based services has declined,” he added. Further newspaper reports confirmed that telephonic services account for around 38% of the overall BPO business in India.
Viswanathan expressed confidence in India’s BPO industry, saying the legislation is unlikely to make much of a dent to the country’s position as a favoured outsourcing destination as customers determine such decisions. “It does not make any business sense to get the same call answered by a high-cost resource in the US whereas the same thing can be done here.”
In 2013, a similar legislation was proposed by a faction of Republican senators but did not become a law.
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