Answer the Call: Virtual Migration in Indian Call Centers

259 Pages·2013·1.73 MB·English

by  Aimee Carrillo Rowe

Answer the Call
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Answer the Call
Virtual Migration in
Indian Call Centers
Aimee Carrillo Rowe, Sheena Malhotra,
and Kimberlee Pérez
University of Minnesota Press
minneapolis • london
Portions of chapter 1 were previously published as “The Rhythm of Ambition:
Power Temporalities and the Production of the Call Center Agent in
Documentary Film and Reality Television,” in Critical Rhetorics of Race,edited
by Michael G. Lacy and Kent A. Ono, 197–213 (New York: New York
University Press, 2011).
Copyright 2013 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Carrillo Rowe, Aimee.
Answer the call : virtual migration in Indian call centers / Aimee Carrillo
Rowe, Sheena Malhotra, and Kimberlee Pérez.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN978-0-8166-8938-5 (hc : alk. paper)
ISBN978-0-8166-8939-2 (pb : alk. paper)
1. Call centers—Social aspects—India. 2. Call center agents—India.
3. Intercultural communication—India. 4. Group identity—India.
5. Transnationalism—India. I. Malhotra, Sheena. II. Pérez, Kimberlee, 1962–
III. Title.
HE8789.I4C37 2013
381´.1420954—dc23
2013030776
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface: On the Ground / vii
Acknowledgments / xiii
Introduction: Answering the Call / 1
1. The Rhythm of Ambition: Power Temporalities and
the Production of the Call Center Agent in U.S. Popular
Culture / 33
2. “I Used to Call Myself Elvis”: Suspended Mobilities in
Indian Call Centers / 67
3. “I Interact with People from All Over the World”:
The Politics of Virtual Citizenship / 101
4. “I’m Going to Sing It the Way Eminem Sings It”:
India’s Network Geography / 135
Conclusion: Returning the Call / 174
Notes / 197
Bibliography / 229
Index / 239
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Preface
On the Ground
Laveena pulls up in her black Land Cruiser in front of Sheena’s family
home in Bangalore. Laveena is the chief financial officer and one of the
founders of I2U, a call center across town in the new Technology Park.
Laveena has arranged for us to conduct interviews at I2U and was gen-
erous enough to pick us up from Sheena’s house on her way to work. We
exchange hellos as we make our way to Tech Park, located on the outskirts
of the city. Laveena’s driver maneuvers quickly and efficiently through
crowded streets, the large vehicle bobbing and weaving as cars communi-
cate through frequent honks. Laveena calmly talks on her BlackBerry to
someone in Germany as we pass makeshift housing. Small markets line the
road; venders push carts and hawk their goods.
The signs to I2U begin to appear about five miles before we reach
the call center as the business of the street life gives way to swanky glass
buildings, which have sprung up to house multinational corporations like
Dell and AOL. High-end housing complexes in various stages of con-
struction are mushrooming along Bangalore’s I.T. corridor, adjacent to
numerous matchbox apartments. Billboards promise safe, luxurious living
conditions—American style—for I.T. professionals. Even though we are
getting further from the center of the city, these apartments are already
priced out of the range of most of the agents who work in Bangalore’s
numerous call centers. The billboards serve as images of aspiration that
might capture agents’ imaginaries, not a reality they might actually attain.
Although agents won’t live here, the industry’s middle and upper manage-
ment will, as will high-end American and other Western employees, who
will use these company flats during their stints in the country.
vii
viii preface
We pull up to the I2U building. Its exterior is made of glossy blue glass
that deepens as it reflects the cloudless sky. The building opens out onto
large manicured lawns, well watered by automatic sprinklers. This build-
ing could be transplanted into the cityscape of a midwestern American
city: the sprawling lawn, the outward expanse of the building, its relative
isolation from other buildings. It is a four-story office building with seven
other business operations taking up the rest of the building space. This is
a very different scenario from Bangalore’s central business district, where
buildings crowd each other out on Commercial Street, barely an arm’s
length between their exteriors. The luxury of lawns and the expansive
architecture of the building signifies a remove from the crowded Banga-
lore streets we have left behind. It is another space, another world.
As we walk through the foyer to the stairs, the building’s glossy first
world exterior gives way to less polished innards. Through a veil of blue
tarps, we glimpse construction in adjoining offices. Several lean-bodied
workers meander through bamboo scaffolding carrying bowls of cement
on their heads. The building’s hasty construction reverberates with the
sound of loud machinery—jackhammers, electric saws and drills, a cement
mixer. The building’s interior is being pieced together as we enter. The
forms of labor being done here are divided by the permeable boundary of
blue tarps: the informatics labor is cordoned off from this unfinished,
behind-the-scenes manual labor. The tarps serve as a veil, demarcating an
uneven division of labor taking place on the ground, even as this site is just
one of countless centers that are designed in service to the West. Laveena
guides us away from the loud, messy construction. “We just moved into
these new offices,” she offers by way of an explanation. “I’d hoped the con-
struction would be completed soon because it’s so noisy.”
Laveena is a study in paradoxes. Her handshake is firm, but her voice is
soft. She dresses in trousers and a kurti,a mix of Western and Indian tradi-
tional wear, presenting a deliberately cultivated professional look, but not
one that is too concerned with the latest fashion. Of medium height and
average build, she has a quick smile and talks at a fast pace, as if her mind
runs faster than her mouth. Her ambition to be the best at what she does is
anything but average. She is as much at ease negotiating on the phone with
clients from all over the world as she is speaking the local language with the
parents of one of her agents to put them at ease about where their daughter
is working. She often plays mother to the agents at her firm, calling them
her kids when she speaks about them, yet, she prides herself on discipline
preface ix
and her no-nonsense approach to managing them. She sees herself as being
on a mission to help the lower-middle-class Indian access the global stage,
setting up a new training and education project to get them the skills they
will need to succeed. And yes, she expects to make a fortune along the way.
As we follow her deeper into the building’s interior, the noise begins to
fade, the sound dampened within soundproofed rooms. We peek into
plush offices that branch offfrom a large central room, then pass through
the main room, which is divided into symmetrical cubicles peopled with
agents wearing headsets, nodding as they look into computer screens and
speak to unseen callers. Laveena ushers us into her corner office. She draws
our attention to the view out the large windows that frame half the office
space, pointing out various buildings of Tech Park. She tells us she knows
the CEO at AOL in case we wish to talk to folks there. It is apparent she is
well connected in the industry, even though hers is a relatively small-scale
operation that concentrates on delivering quality.
Laveena calls for Suraj, a team manager. After a brief introduction, he
gives us a tour. Suraj walks us around the call center floor, where call center
agents, wearing Indian and Western clothes and I.D. cards around their
necks, sit in gray cubicles and talk into headphones or to each other. They
peer at their computer screens, some reading from scripts and others track -
ing the data in front of them. Their animated tones and attention to detail
convey a sense of intimacy with the customers on the other end of the line,
half a world away. In our interviews, we will learn that the easy banter
between agents and their callers is a highly cultivated craft designed to
include discussions of the regional and cultural goings-on in the everyday
lives of their customers: the score of last night’s game, the weather in
Texas, or plans for the upcoming holidays. Agents’ fluency in these details
allows them to establish familiarity with their distant callers. This knowl-
edge and practice ease the flow of business. It anticipates and reroutes the
otherwise expected communication gaps, mistrust, and awkward silences
and offers agents the ontological experience of spatial proximity and cul-
tural fluency. Agents often adopt Western names to ease the exchange for
the customer, who may be put off by long names that sound foreign to
them. These performances of sameness grease the wheels of the interac-
tion, setting the customer at ease to share the sometimes personal and
financial information that the agents have access to or need to gather.
In contrast to the intimacy of the call, the physical space is covered with
signs of call center life: a poster congratulates agents for a contract renewal