The Blogger Views the Indian Call Center Documentary “Bombay Calling”

Tonight I watched Bombay Calling, a documentary film about offshore call centers in India. Offshore call centers have exploded in size in recent years, riding the plummeting cost of international calling charges and the ready availability of VOIP technology. Critics have attacked offshore call centers on several grounds:

- Job Protectionism: Call center workers in India are paid a fraction of the wages earned in Western countries and this provides a tremendous incentive for companies in Europe and North America to close domestic offices and ship jobs overseas.

- Customer Service Quality: Many consumers are turned off by call center agents who don’t speak received standard English and/or don’t understand Western culture. (In fact many companies such as Lenovo, now boast about the fact that their customer service staff is U.S. based!)

- Low Perceived Value of Call Center Jobs: A whole generation of bright and educated Indians are foregoing careers in their chosen professions in favour of ‘McJobs’ answering phones.

- Sustainability of Business Model: There’s always going to be a cheaper country to operate a call center. And so if India makes economic sense today, then watch out, because the entry-barriers are only communications infrastructure and a moderately reasonable English-speaking workforce.

On the other hand, call center jobs provide Indian workers with above market rate salaries, an opportunity to participate in India’s growing middle (ie. consumer) class, and most fascinating from an INSEAD perspective– a chance to participate in globalization. The call center service agents in the film were keenly aware of their own agency as actors in the modern service economy through their interactions with consumers from the West.

My favourite academic paradigm for analyzing call centers is Robin Leidner’s Fast Food, Fast Talk: Service Work and the Routinization of Everyday Life. Leidner focuses on the socio-cultural ramifications of routinized, scripted service interactions in our everyday lives and asks whether the standardization of speech, emotion, and behaviour by service workers in sales calls engenders unease and alienation in customers. No one likes talking to a robot, yet the call center industry has yet to address the disruptive nature that standardization plays in the social coherence of human interactions, in which a service worker’s autonomy, individual identity, perceived authenticity, and spontaneity are all demoted in favour of a manipulative ideology which more often than not, fails to satisfy the customer.

For me the most poignant moment of the film occurred when the filmmakers playfully asked Charles, a Tamil from Chennai who spends his days fielding calls from British customers, if he would like to go to the U.K. He just laughed off the question, but it was clear the filmmakers were unaware of their own conceit and the discomfort of the interviewee.

The Blogger Analyzes the 2006 INSEAD Career Decisions Report

I’ve done the number crunching and it gives me great pleasure to present the exclusive Million Dollar Spatula cutting-edge analysis of the INSEAD 2006 MBA Careers Report. For many would-be INSEAD applicants and students there are only two relevant questions: 1) What are my chances of getting hired by a McBain-class Consulting Firm?; and 2) What are my chances of getting hired by a Bulge Bracket–class Investment Bank?

And so with the freshly-imparted wisdom of my pre-MBA accounting and finance readings, I have developed a series of analysis ratios to answer the foregoing questions. Before we start, I need to explain my methodology and the underlying assumptions behind my analysis. I am a firm believer in segmenting job seekers by functional sector. If you are determined to work in consulting after graduation, then you are not really competing against all 881 graduates for the same pool of consulting jobs, but rather your competition is the 35% (or 308 students) from your class who choose consulting. Although it’s conceivable that some students might simultaneously target two or more functional sectors, based on my discussions with INSEAD students and alumni, graduates tend to hold out for a position in their desired segment. And so I maintain that if a student is determined to focus on a particular sector, he/she will accept a less desirable job within that sector rather than switch fields.

In 2006, the McBain Consulting Ratio™ which I define as the percentage of INSEAD MBA grads who chose consulting and accepted offers from McKinsey, Bain, or BCG was an impressive 51% (157/308). This number must be further controlled for Company Sponsored Students who return to their previous employer. For example, last year McKinsey & Co. hired 75 INSEAD MBA grads, but 27 of those coveted slots went to returning consultants who had previously worked for the firm. So the Adjusted McBain Consulting Ratio™ is 41% (105/256), which is still a fantastic yield. This means that any INSEAD student with no previous connection to a McBain Consulting Firm, who focuses exclusively on consulting, has a 41% chance of landing a position at one of these firms. The rest of the class who choose consulting do of course end up at other excellent name brand consulting firms including L.E.K., Roland Berger, Diamond, Accenture, and Booz Allen.

In 2006, the Bulge Bracket Ratio™ which I define as the percentage of INSEAD MBA grads who chose I-Banking and received offers from Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, HSBC, Lehman Brothers, or UBS was 23% (58/255). The actual number is higher, because INSEAD did not report the precise number of students going to some Bulge banks such as Goldman Sachs, but when adjusted for returning students, the Adjusted Bulge Bracket Ratio™ is 20% (50/247).

The aptly-named Combined Adjusted Bulging McBain Ratio™ (aka Job of Your Dreams Ratio) which combines the consulting and banking ratios while controlling for returning employees is 31% (155/503). This means that attending INSEAD affords you an almost 1 in 3 chance of landing the job of dreams, assuming that you want to work for a Bulging McBain company. But who knows… the job of your dreams might be in another industry such as technology, pharmaceuticals, or energy.

Most noticeably absent from the official INSEAD Careers Report (well other than the absence of the Combined Adjusted Bulging McBain Ratio™) is a qualitative self-assessment of career success measured against each student’s own expectations. I would like to see satisfaction statistics on student opinions of whether they found the functional job they wanted, in their targeted industry, and with their employer of choice. Such data is generally not collected by business schools, but I think the results might reveal as much, if not more, than the numbers disclosed in the Careers Report.