Indian BPO employees play agony aunts

Bangalore: For the graduates working in India's call centre industry, the phone calls they receive from thousands of kilometres away range from the lucid, to the sad, to the ridiculous.
Shahana Sayeed, 26, was on a night shift recently when a middle-aged man from Britain called her up after his wife had divorced him.

"He started crying," said Sayeed, who is working at ICICI Onsource, an outsourcing firm which has 20 global clients including customers from Britain and the United States.

"I didn't know what to say. I had to reassure him first. "He said his wife had left him and he had nothing to do with her accounts. He did not want to go down as a bad customer in front of creditors ... and he started howling and crying and I did not know how to handle that. I finally managed to pacify him," she said.

Sayeed, who joined the firm after being laid off twice in the dotcom crash two years ago, earns Rs 15,000 a month.

Graduates such as her are among the more than two million youngsters that pass out of India's universities every year and fuel the country's high outsourcing growth.

Last year the business process outsourcing sector accounted for about one-fourth of India's total software export revenues of 9.5 billion dollars. Call centre employees like Sayeed are picked up by sports utility vehicles from their homes and dropped back after shifts.