Other Side of the Coin !!!

Let's think from a critics standpoint, if you look at critics of the Indian BPO segment most of them would have never seen a headphone before, it's like Muslim clerics criticizing Satanic Versus, Either just by reading a particular page or just yapping away because his elder cleric said so. But from an insiders stand point why is it not worth working in the industry. Hera are some of them :

Learning :

After a certain point of time, unless you're working with a core product support team of a major vendor, chances that you'll learn anything niche is in the negatives. Most of the employees, their day to day activities are linked to a canned set of instructions which on reality could be done by kids attending high school. So what is that you would end up doing, you'd be resetting passwords, re-installing applications, giving out information on products and warranties etc. Learning becomes a dream. Does any other industry offer learning that's something that we have to find out for ourselves, lets park it for the time being.

Growth :

Though growth is good, growing to be a manager doesn't actually mean much. All you have to do is to ensure that everyone comes to work, if they get to work they are doing it and last but not least no one quits. A typical team leader / Manager will rush into the office, check the attendance. Call up the ones on unplanned leaves and talk. Sample conversation :

Manager: Why are you not at work??
Agent: Sir, am not well stomach is upset.
Manager: Is it upset with you or your girlfriend??
Agent: What sir, It's aching badly.
Manager: When did you realize it's aching, Is it before the thought of work came in or after ??
Agent: Sir, I have gone to the doctor and it's food infection.
Manager: Where did you eat and what did you eat ??
Agent: (Thanking god that he is not requesting the sample of shit, answers) Sir in our cafeteria, I had upma.
Manager: Even I had the same, I am fine.
Agent: Sir, you are there for a long time.(Thinking about upma's condition in his stomach)
Manager: So shall I sent a cab, will you be able to come in late??
Agent: I am still not well, I have lose motions, cannot travel.
Manager : Will you call me when it's over?
Agent: What??
Manager: Motions ...

So growing to a managers level means having loads of shitty conversations like this, convincing someone to come to work after his fathers funeral etc. You will be part of reviews where in there would be questions even god cannot answer, a sample review:

Boss: So why did we get a D-Sat on that issue?
Reportee(TL/AM): Sir, our service pack got installed on her laptop and then it crashed. We had to format and she lost all the data including her kids photos.
Boss: So, why couldn't we convince her about the quality of support? You are all losers, the survey is not about the product, it's about the support.
TL/AM : Sir, while butchering some one we cannot talk about the quality of the knife being used. Even if the knife is the best on this earth, we are butchers.
Boss: So how do we go ahead, I do not want to hear stories, get out and get the numbers in place by next week or start updating your resume.

What could have been the learning from this conversation :

A) Deafness is a quality that you need to work upon, listening is a sign of weakness.
B) Updating your resume is a continuous process and should never be triggered by anyone.
C) Never argue with your Boss and never give picturesque examples as they would add to the agony.
D) All of the above are takeaways.

If your answer is D, you'd survive in the industry.

Work Timings:

Being a weekend dad, the five minutes husband, the Owl uncle are the prospects you could get by being in a BPO. Eating dinner at 9:00 in the night would make you as uncomfortable as being in a Mumbai local. While everyone orders deserts, you'd be swallowing hot piping tea, sweetened up stares of friends and relatives. Living apart from the society, from the agreed upon norms might not be everyone's cup of tea. Being in a joint family could nearly kill you, imagine whoever goes out of the home gives you a hug or wakes you up for a bye, you can no longer dream about sleep, cause you are deprived of the very own pleasure of sleeping. Work timings is a major spoiler, but not for the ones with a lot of heart !!!!

Social Status:

One of the major reason, why people quit a BPO is cause of the social stigma attached to it. The Indian middle class dream of a becoming a doctor and engineer, is so deep rooted that anyone doing anything other than pulling out teeth, writing code or building bridges is a violator of the unwritten yet powerful Indian middle class code of conduct. So however revolutionary you are, being looked down during wedding proposals, within the family during important decisions etc would make you turn your back against the industry.

Work Pressure :

I am amazed when, geeks complain to me about work load, work pressure etc. If you've ever received feedback on a failed sale attempt,though the only thing you did NOT try was to give the moron a lap dance to get his credit card information, you'd know what pressure is. Not the happy go lucky one, pressure that get's into your skin and irks parts of your body you never realized existed before. Pressure of being measured, monitored, rated everyday. Pressure of handling an illiterate customer yelling at the top of her voice, because the butterfly doesn't take her places(MSN does not work) or the coffee holder isn't seen anymore( DVD Drive not getting ejected) is something which you cannot explain to your mom or to your girlfriend. It's a land for the light hearted and if you take stuff to your heart I can vouch you'd die young !!!!.

The Good Side !!!!

It always amazed me when people say that I learned a lesson and the inspiration behind the lesson would be a fall inside the toilet, burns from a cooking experiment etc. The reason behind the same would be that when something unexpected happens, we mortals think, that's when the mind takes a break for a moment and checks "hey what the hell am I doing". Any experience in life is worth it, I spoke about the good side of being in tech support, these are the ones :

Being good to people :

Being a people manager in a BPO is like being Manmohan Singh, you are caught between the ruling party, allies, the opposition and your own conscience (Most politicians are saved from the last excuse.) Anyways imagine managing a team of 100 people, with an average age of 23, the average would have increased because of some retired army man who thought picking calls is better than being alone in front of an ATM. Who would take leaves because of a fight with the girlfriend, cause dog passed away and a new movie of their favorite star has released. With attendance being a key metric and if you are not a peoples person, only way you would know that you are hurt is by seeing the blood stain.

A sample exit interview would tell you the horrors of a people manager :

Manager: So decided to quit, why, what happened ??
Agent: Nothing sir, I have got enough money to buy an electrical guitar.
Manager: What??
Agent: Yes, I did not have enough money to buy one and this is the only way I could earn it.
Manager: Can I give you flexible staffing hours so that you could learn guitar??
Agent: No I have a band and I want to be full time into music.
Manager: Then why did you join us??
Agent: I told you, Guitar!!!.
Manager: Could I give you leaves for three months??
Agent: For what, I do not want to end up like these morons.
Manager: Thanks.

Now the manager goes in for his review and the conversation goes like this :

Manager's Boss: That's the third resignation this month, You're a loser.
Manager: Sir, the guy quit because he had amassed enough money for a guitar, how could I have stopped him.
Manager's Boss: You must have distracted him from his hobby and got him focus on his career.
Manager: Is that possible.
Manager's Boss: I am here because one smart ass did that with me, other wise I would have pursued an MBA and worked in a investment bank.

Patience, strength to take bull shit, skin thicker than Yak will be a part of your achievements list if you could cling on for a span of four years. The above conversations would tell you how.

Management:

In a BPO everything is measured and management is purely based on these measured outcomes. Everything that you do, your team does is colored into red, amber and green. Though perceptions play a huge role, in most of the processes numbers speak, lobbying, "sleep with me campaigns" can get promotions but still the fact remains that everything is measured.

Any amount of analysis, drill down, data modeling is possible in a BPO. If you want to play with data, know how to do presentations, strike a chord with anyone in click, this industry is your best teacher. Being measured and being reviewed on performance day in day out can drive anyone to their best, you will pushed to the wall, dragged and beaten to pulp and the only way you could prove yourself is by performing.

Growth :

If promotions in any industry happens by age and experience, this is a place where intelligence could give experience a run for the money. With young men at the helm of affairs, there is much lesser politics and back stabbing. It's mostly a fun filled collaborative culture. Decisions are made in a flash it means that your hind side would not grow roots into the chair you've been seated for a life time, provided you're good at what you do.

Though the journey is not flamboyant and charismatic, these are some of the pros of working in a BPO, apart from cabs, food, chicks which could be considered as the by products of an effervescent work force. So if you're joining the bandwagon it's not as bad as your Father thinks or your Geeky elder brother imagines.

The Phase of Greed !!!

As in the pursuit of happiness, this part of my life is called being greedy.Life was fun, with five room mates and loads of whining, I was the only one who thought the job was an achievement, who could take it as an achievement. I now realize on why everyone gave me that look "How can you be happy here "???, look.

Anyways Suresh and Jaison would have this conversation daily on how to move ahead in life. At 11:00 am in the morning, I could here them preparing for glory, Jaison had a TCP/IP book with him always, I thought it was born with him. Suresh had a book which said " Let us C", and I always thought what's there in it to see !!!!. Suresh would talk about pointers and functions and will coach Santhosh another room mate who was an REC pass out. Santhosh woke up in his eight semester, and suddenly realized that arrears are adding to the weight of the beer belly he had developed. So with a bunch of engineers, frustrated to the core about their peers who moved ahead in life, I started getting this whining habit. Whining about cabs, about food and what not. It's not just drowsiness that's contagious at a contact center , it's a lot more than that, negative influence is a close second.

The negative influences started pulling me down, the fear of Bush losing the elections in 2004 and Al Gore snatching the bread out of my mouth kept me awake. Most of the temples in Chennai, for the first time received offerings under the name George W Bush !!!!. As time went by and my graduation got completed, I started whining a lot more, forgetting the fact that this was the place I was really happy, the place where I always wanted to me.

With the degree cert adding to the already dormant venom injected by the wannabe geeks, I started jumping jobs. Landed up in another IT giant, was a postmaster there, though I actually realized it after intervention from a friend of mine, who quit and joined another IT giant to become a storekeeper (Asset Management Analyst) I was actually happy logging tickets and passing it on to support groups and the sudden flash of me being a post master made the whole job uncool, jumped again and joined a BPO major only to realize that I was an English teacher, anyways greed never ended till I understood the fact that 90% of the industry is about excelling in excel, adding power to power point and last but not least being excellent in English. Now I have figured out that to stop quitting jobs, I need to wipe out the Einsteins image that I had for myself. IT is more of dish washing, it's not a land of creativity unless you have a different definition for being creative !!!.

Where it Started !!!!!!

Introducing myself in the training room, I realized the fact that I was the only non engineer, non graduate, selected for Dell technical support.Dell was supposedly tough, were people resign, kind of Guantanamo bay was drawn in the minds of everyone, before even we started. I had nothing to loose, cause getting kicked out from Dell would mean moving into a non tech, customer support job, even that's not a bad deal, all that mattered is 200 dollars a month.

Sitting next to me was Mr. Kiran, whose engineering degree came along with a Doctorate, cause the university thought Seven years, is a long time. I had a lot of women, around me, no one dare call them chicks. They always had this "why am I here" look on their face, a look which is a mixture of desperation, jealousy and disappointment. Most of them had long hair, wore spectacles, smelled of some oil and most importantly never looked as if they lived. I thought, that the only thing that would get them to an orgasm would be a block of code getting executed without errors. Most of them solved puzzles about trains running into each other, problems which always spoke about the age of Ramu and Shyamu (some stupid ids I thought), their relationship with each other etc. Infosys another giant hired people who could solve them, so they prayed at the Shakuntala Devi temple all day. TCS, Infosys and CTS seemed to be the only places they wanted to go to, they wouldn't even want to go back home.

Anyways, sitting there in a corner, I knew that headphones is the only way and I had to focus.Without a Graduation, without a family, 200 dollars a month seemed to be huge and I respected it by all means. Being an employee in Tidal park made you one among the elite(Tidal park was kind of Chennai's wall street ), but inside the Tidal park, I felt our employees were just above the Janitors. Yeah, we came when people left, we brushed our teeth and hit the toilet when everyone watched soaps on television and gulped down their dinner. Everything was upside down.

One good thing about India or the society here is the fact that anywhere you go there are classes. In IT we have the Brahman's ( The Priests, closest one to the gods), Kshatriya's ( The warlords), Vysya ( Businessmen, money lenders) and the Shudras ( Janitors, Scavengers etc.), I cracked it within a week. I knew that I would be a part of the lowest stack, cause BPO's figured out to be there. Because working in a call center is marginally above being an actual call girl or a Gigolo.(Apply for a Credit card, you would get where am coming from). The Vysyas were the IT support guys, yeah the ones who fixed desktop's, ran around with Lan cables and also don't forget the System/ Exchange admins. The warlords were Project Managers,Testers,Quality guys etc. The top brass obviously were the developers, R&D team, they would punch in their cards @ the smoking zone and pee @ the desk.

So the first workplace turned out to be an office were everything other than me and the furniture changed once in six weeks.Where everyone thought that they are made for salvation through writing codes or administering databases. I was the deaf frog, just had to go on, cause I liked the company, for them all that mattered was the guy, and the only question asked was, are you capable or not.Picking my first call, was an experience, I would compare to my first kiss, that feel is still there, fixing some ones desktop over the phone was the coolest thing I ever thought I would do. At least, I had a desk to sit, was in an air conditioned office, was picked up an dropped back, was respected for my contributions, looking at it from a retrospective stand point I was the happiest man on earth!!!!!