The birth of India's call centre industry

SPEAKER_1 (0:04)

1997, the world is on the brink of a revolution that will change the course of modern commerce. What begins as a pioneering venture will grow into a global industry. This is the birth of the Indian Call Centre.

Hello Business Daily listeners. This is Witness History from the BBC World Service. We're the podcast that brings history to life in just nine minutes through the eyes of one key witness and lots of truly amazing news archive. We thought you might like to hear this episode from our archive on India's First Call Centre, told by Rebecca Kesby in 2019 through an interview with Pramod Bhasin, one of the first people to spot the opportunity.

Witness History publishes stories like this every weekday. So, if you enjoy it, please subscribe wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

Pramod Bhasin (0:58)

You know, I wish I could tell you there was a Eureka moment. There wasn't. It was quite a simple idea.

But it grew in complexity and potential, as we thought about it, because it seemed so obvious that it was almost surprising nobody had thought of it earlier.

Rebecca Kesby (1:17)

Pramod Bhasin had been working abroad in the US and Britain for General Electric for more than 20 years. When in his mid-40s he headed home to India, he saw an opportunity to build a new company and one that would change India's employment market forever.

Pramod Bhasin (1:33)

I had the ability, both to understand what US businesses wanted, but also the excitement of starting up a new business venture in India.

So for me it was an enormously exciting time, both from a career perspective as well as the joy of coming home and being able to do something new and different. The caliber of people we could attract at that time and now in India was phenomenal.

The costs at which you could hire people were incredibly low compared to international salaries for the same qualification, not quite the same qualification, roughly the same qualification. So you could hire a graduate at that time pretty much for $3,000 a year. You could hire a charlotte accountant for $14,000, $15,000. You could hire a master's degree for $5,000, $6,000. And I could see that they were as good as anybody I'd worked with anywhere in the world. English speaking was another one. Once we advertised and we needed to fill 20 spots, and we got 8,000 applications out of which 4,000 were totally acceptable. I knew I had an avalanche coming at me. Literally, at that point in time, you realise you were sitting on a goldmine. It didn't hit us till that point in time.

Rebecca Kesby (2:45)

The early days of Pramod's pioneering call centre were rather basic.

Pramod Bhasin (2:50)

The first call centre experiment was again done in a tiny room, 25 feet by 25 feet. Barriers made of cardboard between phones, separators made with saris. We didn't have soundproof stuff. We didn't know how to do that, so we brought saris and curtains. So we went there. It was a shambles, there were wires everywhere, there were saris, there were calls going on, and just starting to experiment.

Rebecca Kesby (3:20)

But appropriate office space wasn't going to be the biggest challenge to overcome. India's notoriously unreliable phone network would be the first major stumbling block.

Pramod Bhasin (3:30)

You know, in those days we all had three phone lines at home, or two phone lines, because one was down all the time.

So calling my bosses up and telling them how I was going to do all their processing for all their mission critical processes on our phone lines was considerably challenged because the phone line would drop as I would tell them this.

And so this used to happen quite a lot. When we went to the telecom authority, of course they laughed at us and said, are you kidding? We're going to let you put phone lines so that you can dial people all over the world? Are you trying to set up a phone company? It's not going to happen, right? But outside this building, if you go, is a true landmark of India. It's a giant satellite dish. It was like we had found, you know, Nirvana when they put that satellite dish up there, and there's a picture of all of us crowded under that dish, because that was our first private link allowed in India to a private company to dial out. It had a waiting time, so there was a lag. There was a time lag when you talk to people, which was a pain, so we worked hard to reduce that. We had lots of issues with it, but it was a huge landmark for us. Getting that big satellite dish in place was the start, I think, in some respects, of the entire revolution.