Complaints prompt UK major to revert call centres from India

Updated on: Monday, July 11, 2011

British finance major Santander today announced that it was reverting all call centres from India back to the UK following complaints by customers over their "frustration" in dealing with offshore employees.

Santander is the second British company to bring back its outsources operations this month after New Call Telecom, which competes with BT and Sky to offer home telephone services, broadband and low-cost international calls, said it was bringing back its outsourced work from India because operating there was no longer cheap.

Santander said in a statement: "Santander UK is returning all of its Indian call centres to the UK so that all retail banking customers ringing the bank will have their call answered by a UK-based employee".

It added: "The move is part of Santander's programme to further improve the service it offers and follows feedback from customers who say dealing with an offshore call centre is a frustration that can lead to dissatisfaction".

The calls will now be handled in the UK in Leicester, Glasgow and Liverpool, instead of Mumbai, Pune and Bangalore, the company said and added that 500 new staff would be recruited to deal with the calls.

Santander chief executive Ana Botin said: "This is what our customers have told us is the most important factor in terms of the satisfaction with the bank, and we have listened to them and decided to bring all of our retail call centres back from India".

New Call Telecom is opening a call centre in Lancashire after being attracted by low commercial rents and cheap labour costs.

New Call's chief executive, Nigel Eastwood, said: "We did a cost and service analysis of returning home and there was an absolute parity between what we are paying for a third-party call centre in India and here in the UK".

He added that using British staff will also cut costs in the average amount of time taken to deal with customer inquiries.

Eastwood said: "The average handling time in the UK is three minutes. But if you go out to India, you need to add another minute unless it's a very efficient operation, so that means we can actually reduce the headcount with the saving".

He added that in India in the past decade, real-estate prices have gone up massively, while salaries have also crept up, as call centres have grown.

New Call will pay 4 pounds a square foot for space in Burnley, which Eastwood says is similar to that in Mumbai and New Delhi.

Eastwood said: "Salaries in India aren't that cheap any more".

Add to that the costs of us flying out there, hotels and software, and the costs are at an absolute parity.

In the UK we will pay workers the minimum wage.

Given the current economic environment, we will get good "sticky" employees who will also receive bonuses linked to performance.

Complaints prompt UK major to revert call centres from India

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