BPO Agents pretend to be cleaners and security guards
By Nitin Paul

Guess how some of the Agents at Sparsh BPO in Gurgaon, North India start their rosters, especially in the 7 am morning shift?  The agents working for Sparsh BSNL process take the inbound calls in a jovial, irreverent mood during the very first ten minutes till 7.10 am.   During these 10 minutes there is no ‘barging’ when Team Leaders or other senior staff can drop in to listen to the calls.

The normally hard working and professional Agents amuse themselves and cheer up the rest of the team by behaving in a way which is a not permitted when the bosses are around. As the calls start pouring into Sparsh from the BSNL service users, one Agent would respond, ‘Sir, mai sweeper bol raha hun, Sahab abhi nahi aai hani. Kripaya thorider bad fone karen (Sir, I am sweeper on this side, please could you call later as the Agents have not started work yet). Another agent would respond as a Chowkidaar(Security Guard) while others would pose as Chai Wala(Tea Vender) and have fun with the callers. 

When asked about their jovial style of starting the day, they said that since the nature of the process was boring, they wanted to start the day on happy note. As majority of the inbound calling happens to be in regional and local languages, the callers who are baseline customers generally abuse and scold them over the phone, one of them said. Other agent said that since the quality barge remains almost non-existent during first ten minutes of the day and there was almost no possibility of superiors and team leaders barging in and listening to their conversation with the callers, they take the liberty of ‘treating’ the early callers the same way. This brings some amusement in their lives before starting another boring day, he told techgoss.

For some of the other Agents, the GPRS enquiries are not only longer in duration as compared to other processes,  but sometimes the callers take unusually long times to understand the solutions given to them.  The Agents sometime lose their cool and scold the callers and hang up on them. The incidents of BPO agents having fun with the callers are on the rise. Some of the customers of mobile service provider Idea have complained that a few of the BPO agents calling them up for Idea services not only talk loose, sometimes they also scold and abuse the customers before hanging up.

Techgoss note: Sparsh is the domestic subsidiary of Intelenet Global Services (P) Ltd.  It offers state of the art solutions to Vertical Industries to meet their voice and BPO needs.  Sparsh currently has 5200 seats operating 24 by 7, and has the potential to scale up to 20,000 thousand seats by next year