[Reader-list] Chronicling the remote agent

[taha at sarai.net]

Dear all,
Here is a paper that Iram and I presented at a conference on 'New Global
Workforces and Virtual Workplaces: Connections, Culture and Control', at
National Institute of Advanced Studies.
We look forwards to critiques, comments and suggestions.
Cheers
Taha

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/

Chronicling the Remote Agent: Reflections on Mobility and Social Security
of Call Centre Agents in New Delhi
by

Taha Mehmood
Iram Ghufran 

This paper, through personal stories, work narratives, and anecdotes, seeks
to explore the issues of mobility and social security in the international
call centre industry. The text is largely gathered through encounters we
have had with call centre agents, their families and friends. The research
was supported by Sarai-CSDS as part of their Independent Fellowship
Programme in 2004.

*Wave*

The call centre industry, first making its appearance in the mid 1990s in
India, grew by leaps and bounds, embracing and consuming upwardly mobile
middle class urban India. Modern steel and glass structures in the
tradition of IT sector offices were an added lure to a mostly young and
vibrant work force. The primacy of a variety of American and British
accents, attractive salary packages, an inflated lifestyle characterised
the industry's image.

Co terminus with these, emerged stories of randomness and monotony of the
work, frequent change in shifts and product campaigns, high attrition rates
and the frequently changing alias, shadowing this virtual flight to America
and Europe. Stories of ill health, frustrations and a career that led to
No-where land abound business magazines and newspapers. Yet an ever-rising
flood of youngsters, together with housewives, retired army officials and
school teachers joined the fray.

*Drift*

Jamie's father hails from Baroda, a small city in Gujarat. He started his
career with a Pharma firm in mid seventies as a Medical Representative,
earning two hundred and fifty rupees a month. In the early nineteen
eighties, he changed the line to Fast Moving Consumer Goods industry. As a
sales representative his job was to set up a primary market for the battery
maker, Nippo Company. He would travel by State Transport Corporation buses,
hopping into and skipping out of small and medium sized, rural and
semi-urban towns of Gujarat, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. Talking to
dealers, offering schemes in cash and kind, telling them about the premium
value of Nippo batteries over other batteries, clinching some deals and
traveling on.

In the subsequent decades of eighties and nineties, he changed many
companies, changing the product line with each switch. He sold a range of
products – from washing machines to batteries to hair oil, toothpastes
and facial creams. But two things always remained constant: His job
profile, which was always to set up primary markets in rural and semi-urban
areas; and his paycheck, which increased every time he switched companies.

In the late nineties he landed up with a job with a Multi-National Company
which manufactured consumer durables. His job was still the same, but he
took home around forty-five thousand rupees a month. Despite an experience
of a quarter of a century in direct sales behind him, he was still stuck at
middle level management. Lack of an MBA degree was often cited as the
reason for his non-advancement. The Gujarat riots forced the TV maker to
close shop, leaving Jamie's father desperate, in search for a job.

After sixteen months of a trying search, disappointment and frustration, he
found a job with a start-up local hair oil and broom manufacturing firm for
seven thousand rupees per month as salary. For two years, he worked as
sales manager for Gujarat region, tottering small villages and non-descript
roadside towns; talking, conversing, persuading and cajoling the local
dealers he now knew so well, to buy a new product. After two years, the
company asked him to leave as they were planning to hire a younger sales
manager with an MBA degree.

Jamie Johnson feels quite perplexed that his father, at fifty-four, despite
being a postgraduate in Pharmacology, is struggling to find a job. Jamie
always wanted to have a career in media, preferably to work for an English
language news channel. But he didn't have the requisite training, command
and control over English, a language that constantly eluded him. His quest
for mastery over English made him join an international call centre. For
him the job was a stop-gap; the calling was of a television news anchor. He
was twenty-one when he joined the industry at a salary of seven thousand
rupees a month. He joined the industry to learn the soft skills, be trained
in American and British accents, hone his confidence and move on. But four
years and five call centres later, he feels that he should spend some more
time here before eventually hopping on to an English language news channel.
Despite being 'just' a graduate he earns around forty thousand rupees a
month, plus perks. He now wants his unemployed father to join the call
centre industry.

The life worlds of Jamie and his father are symptomatic of the tectonic
shifts that the job market in urban India has witnessed in the last few
decades. However, these shifts were neither spontaneous nor premeditated.
On the contrary, these changes arose from the ruins of earlier notions of
'white caller' work. The vortex of the call centre carries with it memories
of instability of work, vulnerability of labor and the arbitrariness of the
contract of wage and tenure. The circulation of a 'white caller'
professional within an industry – changing companies, product lines, job
profiles and routines – is not an unknown phenomenon in the Indian work
scenario. The emergence of Information Technology enabled service sector,
of which the international call center industry forms a major segment, has
redefined work in ways that calls for new approaches to look at changes in
work cultures.

Jamie, even with a far less formal education than his father, earns a
competitive salary. He earns in four years what his father was able to earn
after putting in twenty-three arduous years of service. For his father,
post graduation in pharmacology, a degree considered rarity in his times,
was of no help for a major part of his career. From the nineteen nineties
onwards his work profile was stunted because of a supposed 'lack' of
another specialised degree. Jamie changed as many jobs in the first four
years of his career as his father did in the first decade of his working
years. Jamie feels that if he sticks too long in one organisation, it might
harm his career in the long run. According to him a change every two years
is considered healthy as it denotes productivity, a yearning for growth, a
need to accept new challenges, and a will to learn and execute different
job requirements. Staying with one company, on the other hand, may be taken
for slackness and lack of ambition. The move by many call centres to employ
middle level professionals may hint towards a well-formulated tactic to
tackle high attrition rates.

The tottering nature of work and leisure is not limited to agents alone.
The winds of capital movement produces fluctuations in the wide spectrum-
from investments to wage rates. As the market develops, the industry
responds by changing the venue, rituals, protocols, and profile of call
centres, leaving the nature of work invariable.

*The Matrioshka Doll*

A dusty, broken track just off the inner Ring Road leads to a cluster of
unplanned localities and government colonies. Bhagwan Nagar, mixed locality
and urban village, lies a kilometer or so inside. A /rickshawala/ charges 5
rupees for a ride to Bhagwan Nagar from the main road. There used to be a
'/pucca/' road, but it was dug up last year to lay cables and sewer lines.
There is talk that it will be repaired after the monsoons.

Shops selling everything from hosiery to toys to household products to
hardware, PCOs and cyber cafes, property dealer offices and chemists line
the road. An odd electrician, a furniture maker and a number of juice
stalls selling fresh mixed-fruit juice, a few /paanwalas/, and small and
big /dhabas/ that spill over to the streets, add to the vibrancy of this
area. Fruit and vegetable vendors create space for their wares on
non-existent pavements, leaving pedestrians and beggars and a local madman
to jostle for space with an increasing number of cycles, /rickshaws/,
autos, taxis and cars and animals on the road.

Buildings that have seen better days, newly constructed houses smelling of
fresh paint and a few remnant structures of the former village, on the
brink of collapse, propped up with the support of wooden facades, make
Bhagwan Nagar a rich collage of architectural styles reflecting a temporal
spectrum of many decades. As land value increased and incomes improved, a
floor was added to the house and rented out to a steady stream of migrant
workers, itinerant professionals, students, petty businessmen, small
industrialists and daily wage earners keen to make home in a well connected
locality with cheap rents. In this much contested and congested space also
lies Microgate, an all night internet cafe. Our regular haunt in a bid to
stay connected.

Microgate is located in the basement of a three-story building, easily one
of the better constructions of the area, sandwiched between a general
grocery store and a /saree/ boutique. Narrow steps lead to a tin door,
which is usually open at all times. A neat black and white A- 4 size poster
– an advertisement for Biology and Zoology tutorials for class XII – is
pasted on the peeling green paint of the door. A few more steps lead to the
dimly lit cafe. The inside mirrors the congestion outside. The ten feet by
ten feet basement hall is divided into four sections: A small reception
area next to the stairs, a cubicle with a table and a revolving chair for
Guddu, the owner, a small empty space, where the technical and managerial
staff of the cafe sleep at night, and a hall, which is the main cafe space.
This area is further partitioned in four rows with space for sixteen
computers. Coloured printouts of computer games like Tom & Jerry and Road
Rash are pasted on the wall. Dysfunctional air conditioners adorn the side
walls, seeming taxidermies of extinct priceless birds. A low hum of
conversations can be heard as one enters the cafe. A cheap metallic wind
chime at the door gives incessant background music to the steady beat of
fingers moving on keyboards. The atmosphere reeks of stale air and human
sweat. However, in the mornings Guddu lights a daily stick of incense, as
offering to the Gods to bring more business to his cyber cafe. Guddu
provides better services than many cafes of the locality. There is
round-the-clock supply of water, electricity and internet connectivity at
Microgate. Some say it is because his mother is positioned as an important
worker with a leading political party.

One night, a couple of weeks ago, we used Microgate's services to send off
a few urgent emails. It was late and by midnight we were the only
customers. Some of the staff were dozing on makeshift beds in the sleeping
corner and most of the lights had been switched off. At about 1:00 PM
however, people started trickling in – young men, in one's and two's,
sometimes a helmet in hand. They began taking position on the vacant seats,
behind the till now blank screens. Before long, a semi-American accent was
confirming participation in Pope John's funeral.

A few months before, a middle level manager of an elite international call
centre contacted Guddu. The proposition was to share some load of that call
centre in return for sum of forty thousand rupees a month. Guddu agreed. He
hired some out-of-work and some working agents who had prior experience of
the industry on 'payment on performance' basis, from 2:00 AM till 10:00 AM.

With no frills of dinner and snacks, pick-up or drop, and no facilities
like toilets, cash coupons or tickets to multiplexes, Guddu operates an
'international call centre'. He manages a complete gamut of campaigns and
products, just like any other Business Process Outsourcing unit in Noida
and Gurgaon. For the agents of this international call centre, there is no
accent training, minimal process training, and a more informal relationship
with the boss. Unlike many other premium call centers, less monitoring,
supervision and surveillance takes place here, even as the work contract is
more fragile. The call centre aspect of the operations of the cyber cafe
has been closed since last week for about one month now, as the contract
has expired; and while Guddu finalises his deal with the next company, his
team of agents has moved on.

Guddu's call centre marks the transformation and shift in an eager
industry, searching for and finding newer avenues of business. This lofty
stagger seems to displace the logic and rationality of a trade composed of
highly systematised processes, in an overwhelmingly fragmented manner. The
outsourcing of work processes within the outsourcing industry and the
subsequent mushrooming of a parallel international call centre industry in
the city is an indicator of a leveling of work contracts and wages in times
to come. Located on the fringes, Microgate may appear flirtatious, but it
is a marker of a desire by the industry to widen its base into larger
entrepreneurial services.

*Tag*

The management at Glocall Services, an international call centre, found it
difficult to maintain order at the main entry point of the office building.
They had given the contract for security, its fourth one in the last seven
months, to Leo Securities.


Mata Prasad, a security guard posted at Glocall, tries to avoid main gate
duty largely due to his complete inability to manage the thronging crowds
of workers passing through the gates. Agents would often come in two's or
three's, some times in larger groups, and always in a rush to reach their
seats before the login time begins. For them, Mata Prasad with his
entourage of security guards was an unwelcome speed breaker. He along with
Vinod, inside the guard hut to distribute and collect access cards, Bashir
at the metal detector and Jai Kishan, the walkman-totting, pot bellied
supervisor were nothing more than a road block, an obstacle to be overrun
in the mad rush to reach the campaign floor in time. They would badger,
mock, ignore, coerce, grimace and do almost anything to scuttle past the
narrow passage way at the entrance.

For Mata Prasad and his colleagues, the time of shift change was a
challenge. Their duty was to make sure that order prevailed, that agents
were checked, their identities confirmed, and their bodies scanned for any
undesirables. He knew that his agency was failing on all four counts. And
if something was not done quickly, it wouldn't be long before he would be
out on streets sipping sugary lukewarm /chai/ and waiting for another
contract to come his agency's way.

His prayers were soon answered in the form of ping-pong balls. The security
agency, after giving much thought to the problem, installed a new system.
The six feet broad entrance gate was partitioned into four sections:
visitors, agents, management and women. At the head of each was a small
cardboard box containing four ping-pong balls – white, pink, red and
yellow. Agents had to move through their respective partition, and as they
would reach the main entrance gate, Mata Prasad, along with his colleagues,
would be waiting for them by the box. Agents obeyed blanket orders issued
by the management to display their identity cards at all times. With the
new system at the gate, an agent would pause for at least ten seconds to
pick a ball from the box. This would halt the line, giving Mata Prasad
enough time to check his ID card and tally the photograph on it with his
face. If the agent was lucky, he might dig up the white ball, which would
mean that he could go straight to his floor with out being checked. A pink
ball would mean a complete body check. A yellow ball would mean body-scan
through a metal detector and a red ball stood for the entire process – a
body check, followed by a manual metal detector scan and subsequently
passing through the metal detector door.

Agents never knew how many balls of which color are placed in each box. The
unpredictability of the system became its chief selling point to the
management and staff.

For John Baker, and agent at Glocall, the line up at the gates was just
another addition that restricted his movement inside the call centre. Apart
from his campaign floor, the cafeteria, the stairs, the foyer, the lobby
and the loo, most of the six-floored building was out of bounds for him.
>From the logins, logouts, the AHT's, the canteen breaks, to bio-breaks and
commuting schedules, everything was timed. Barging of calls, supervision of
his person through CCTV cameras, regulation of work by the Team Leader,
tedious repetition of a script over two hundred times a day, coupled with
daily monitoring and evaluation of calls taken by each agent was a routine
that defined his halting drifts and impermanent stays at four call centres
in the last three years.

A training workbook at his Centre reads:

/Change negative thoughts to positive thoughts.

'If it goes down again, I'll scream!' can be written as, 'I can't control
when the computer blinks out, so it's not worth getting upset about.
Besides, I'm ready for it. I have a pad of paper and my notes handy, so
technical difficulties wont disrupt my calls that much.'

'Sheesh! I get all the crancky customers!' can be written as 'Its really a
hard task to handle this customer but I will solve his problems and hope I
get a better one in the future.' /

Hazel recalls how, after a year in a prestigious international call centre,
she ended all her non-work conversations with 'Thank you for calling. It
was a pleasure talking to you ma'am/sir'. Her call centre conversations
entered the realm of sleep and room mates assert that she talked to her
customers in her sleep. For Hazel, the call centre was a learning ground.
She quit her job a few months ago and now runs a call centre placement
agency in partnership with her sister in Okhla.

The phrase 'NOT ALLOWED' – figures quite frequently in an agent's
vocabulary, as strict rules monitor her movement across time and space. The
agent, though largely immobile, moves through cables and Internet,
browsing/sifting/excavating tonnes of data that is vital, tempting and
dangerous. The density of panoptical gestures in a call centre seems to be
closely linked to its profile and the nature of data that flows through it.

The site of an international call center is often fraught with
micro-managed processes. These processes ensure rationalisation of
surveillance practices, manufacture and enforce codes of conduct, restrict
movement of agents in and around the space of a call centre, create
procedures of access, normalise mechanistic functioning of the body through
predetermined routines, and segregate and control temporality of work
shifts by minutely isolating each phase of an agent's time and constantly
enforcing and appraising modes of performance.

In sharp contrast to the protocols of imperceptibility lies the cubicle or
a workstation in a hall, with rows upon rows of seats arranged
systematically. A typical cubicle of an international call centre mirrors
multiple subjectivities. As the clock ticks, its hands churning away time
and shift, agents change and new, different, known and unknown ones occupy
the same seat. The interior of the cubicle or the look of a workstation
reflects the persona of the agent. A disfigured can of beer, a family
photograph, a key chain, a toy car, a miniature bell, stickers with
motivational messages, a friendship band, a birthday card – all these are
mute testaments to the presence of the working individual. As an agent
occupies a cubicle, she marks the space through these mementos of her self,
subjugating the seat by an impression of her identity. These inscriptions,
although temporary in nature, convey her desire to assert her presence
amidst prevalent practices of indistinguishablity.

*Stories*

As agents move through shifts, workstations, campaigns, processes and
companies, with their movement measured in time, distance, currency and
rank, they carry with them unique experiences of work and leisure, of
negotiation and compliance and of engagement and attrition. The call centre
whispers its secrets, regales its jokes, recounts its mundane details, and
exaggerates its adventures through these agents, who are the carriers,
custodians and transmitters of their narratives.

Their stories find motion and mount on the existing networks of cables and
communities, entering the realm of the virtual and the real, the drawing
room and the chat room, the blog and the diary. The telling sometimes adds
romance, spice and luster to the narratives; while some wither away,
unrecognised.

Dave works as an engineer with an automation company in Delhi. He had just
returned from Orissa after completing a preliminary survey of a coalmine,
when we first met him. He very matter of factly recalled his first and last
day on the floor of Raksh International.

Wednesday June 09, 2004
5: 55pm
Dave Singer logs in. His Team Leader walks past nodding his head in
recognition and possible approval. It is Dave's first day on the floor. The
first time he is to be on air, live. He was one of the top performers in
his training group and has now been allotted one of the top performing
teams in the campaign. The process deals in customer care for ANZ digital
scanners – 'the scanner that shows the true picture'. It was a technical
process with an AHT of 17 minutes. The team comprises of a few newcomers
and a large number of old hands. The Team Leader has recently been promoted
to the post and has an experience of over two years as a calling agent.

6:02 pm
The first call. Dave's heart beat shot up. He takes the call after being
poked in the ribs by a colleague. On hearing the complaining New Yorker on
the other end, he forgets his accent and the standard opening line of
'Thank you for calling ANZ services. This is Dave. May I have your case ID
or telephone number starting with three digit area code?

With the Team Leader (TL) and half a dozen agents staring down at him,
noting every move, gesture and stumble in voice with disdain, his
nervousness increased and after a brief, awkward conversation with the
customer, a Mr. Patrick Shiner from Brooklyn, Dave, bypassing all protocols
ended the call with an abrupt 'Bye! Call me later.'

Dave did not have much time to recover before the screen showed him the
second call. He avoided meeting the TL's disapproving gaze and gradually
confidence returned. When he looked up from the screen next time, nine
hours had passed.

At the stock-taking meeting, the TL gave him a verbal trashing, appraised
his soft skills, while recommending him back to the training programme for
two months.

In the cab that morning, while going home, knowing that he had an
exceptionally bad start, other agents tried to lighten the mood. One senior
agent, Phil Rogers narrated his own experience of how he froze on his first
call and how two colleagues had to wrestle the receiver from his hands at
the end of the call because he was too terrified to let the let the
instrument go. An agent named Neil Anderson recounted how he once gave a
wrong alias to a customer. Instead of saying Neil Anderson, he said, Neil
Robinson. The customer almost jumped with joy mistaking him for Neil
Robinson, a famous baseball player. With the precise intention of avoiding
dead air, Neil promptly replied that his name was Anderson and not
Robinson. The customer said that she was positive she heard Robinson.
Literally thinking on his feet, Neil replied that he recently got married
and changed his last name.

Neil Anderson, age 25, was a manic workaholic agent. He had only three
loves in his life – Marijuana, Wills Navy Cut and making sales. He ran
away from home at age fourteen because his mother didn't allow him to carry
on with the legacy of his father and grand father, to work as a fighter
pilot. At fifteen years of age, he started his career selling Hawkins
pressure cookers as a door to door sales man in Calcutta. He joined the
call centre industry with a direct sales experience of five years. From
selling the complete edition of Encyclopedia Britannica to Super Clean
washing powder, he had sold a complete range of fast moving consumer
products.

When he joined the industry he couldn't get used to the idea of being tied
to a chair for hours. So he devised a way to deal with this, and after some
years of sustained above-average performance, he came up with a time-tested
maxim. 'You can't do calling unless you do dope'. He believed that one
couldn't make sales unless one is on a high. His job was to sell toy models
of Harley Davidson bikes to a targeted constituency of ex-US army
personnel. He made a few friends while calling and would often spend hours
talking to them about comparative advantages and disadvantages of various
models. Predictably, when he became a team leader he very carefully
selected agents who matched his personality traits. His team's sales
performance was trailing the leader within three months of the launch of
the process. This was an achievement, considering that there were about a
dozen processes on his floor.

Soon complaints of agents doing dope on the floor, under the table, in the
loo, on the stairs and in the canteen area started circulating around. It
wasn't long before the operations manager called on Neil and shared his
thoughts about sacking the whole team including the TL. Neil in a fit of
anger, mouthed the last quarter's sales results, gave reasons for the high
motivation level of the agents, and explained the rationale for
above-average accomplishments. The manager left without saying a word. Last
heard, Neil, bored with selling credit cards had moved to another call
center in Pune.

The narratives of call center workers like Neil, Hazel, Dave and Jamie
reappear as anecdotes registered in the collective memory of other agents.
As they recollect stories of virtual flights, of unformed friendships, of
the moment of attrition and of sketches of resistances and cooperation,
they circulate a valuable experience of work and in the process create a
virtual and mental archive of labor and work practices in the new economy.
Their narratives weave a complex tapestry of the everyday and night in a
call center.

The industry marks an important transformation in the nature of service
sector work – where the color of the workers' collar is indeterminately
mottled, where for every GE and Daksh there is a Microgate, where for every
anomaly there is a ping-pong ball, and where despite containment, stories
and tales seep out of unnoticed crevices and circulate.

The end++++++++